Perhaps Stockholm deserved better from us, but we really must have needed the sleep.  We did not rouse ourselves until almost noon today. Hip Swedish hostels are surprisingly quiet in the mornings.

Somewhat refreshed, we met the bright sunlight of this bright city and started to check off things people do when they’re in this country.

First, we went to Max.  It’s Sweden’s answer to McDonalds — though they have McDonalds and even Burger King here, too.  The selection at Max is quite broad and the food is good.  Zoe wandered farthest off the beaten path by getting a getting a cheese burger that consisted completely of cheese, which had been grilled just like it was a burger. She reviewed it pretty highly.

After that we walked around a lot.  This is a very walkable city, with wide sidewalks and clearly marked bike lanes that we’ve mostly been able to avoid encroaching.  Car traffic seems to be less than in other major cities we’ve visited.   Between the busses, trolleys, metro stations, and ferries, there seems to be plenty of public transportation options.  But with streets and architecture as appealing as Stockholm’s, walking seems to be the way to go.

Our feet brought us to a wide pedestrian walkway flanked by stately buildings on one side and the harbor on the other. There were plenty of cafes in full lunch mode by the time we made it over.  Some of the cafes and bars stretched out onto docks in the water between fancy boat moorings and ferry landings.

 

The next thing to do in Sweden, and the main goal of the day’s walking, was to get us to a museum.  There are lots of museums in Stockholm, and they come in many varieties.  Our first choice focused on a 17th Century sailing ship called the Vassa.  It was one of the largest ships of its time and it was very richly decorated and heavily armed.  And it sank after sailing only 1,000 feet or so because it didn’t have enough ballast in the bottom to keep it upright.

It’s difficult to imagine people in the US setting up a top-notch museum based on a not-quite-so-proud moment in our engineering history, but that’s what they did here.  The Vassa Museum is an amazing place centered around the ship, how it was built, and how it was resurrected from the bottom of the harbor in the 1950s.

The museum’s 20-minute movie about the Vassa’s saga ends with the idea that if the ship had been more seaworthy it would have been destroyed or dismantled by now.  Becuase it sank so quickly and so close to the city it was preserved in the mud and relatively easy to access.  They say that 95 percent of the ship, which is on full display in the museum’s main hall, is from its original construction.

From here, we had many choices of museums to browse.  There was one based solely on other shipwrecks besides the Vassa.  There was one on vikings and one on spirits (not the occult kind, but the distilled kind) and one on nordic life.  As we decided which to visit next we chewed on long ropes of Swedish licorice and contemplated scrapping everything for a visit to the amusement park that towered over the section of town we were in.

Actually, most of us wanted nothing to do with the amusement park, and we all pretty much knew where we wanted to go.  The licorice ropes were just to keep us occupied until our allotted time came for us to enter the ABBA museum.  And so, once 16:30 came around on our clocks, we embarked on an adventure into a world which few people realize exists.  It is a world where ABBA merits a whole museum that is crowded enough to make people wait for assigned times to enter.

The course of the museum starts at the end of ABBA’s story, with Benny, Bjorn, Frida and Agnetha recording themselves with special cameras for the hologram ABBA experience currently running in London.  This is the phenomenon where people pay to go to a concert to watch ABBA holograms perform with a live band.

At least we got to see actual ABBA stuff, like their recording studio, which was moved to the museum, and the home made double base that was part of Benny’s (or perhaps Bjorn’s) first band.  And the costumes!  Oh, the costumes.  Capes and jumpsuits for miles.  We are all pretty knowledgeable about ABBA now.  Ask us for some trvia; we’ll probably know it.

About now we had to start being careful.  Our checkout time tomorrow is 10 a.m.  No sleeping until noon for us.  So we shouldn’t be staying out too late either.  We passed on any further museum visits and continued walking through the gardens of the surrounding area until we were able to retrace our steps back toward the hostel.

Here we did something that most people do in Sweden, we avoided stopping in for a drink on one of the harborside bars we passed in the morning.  We were sorely tempted to give it a try.  We even stopped into one; but we were turned off by two things: 1.) They strangely didn’t have a non-alcoholic option besides mineral water; 2.) The alcoholic drinks were stunningly expensive.  None of us needed to try a $29 mojito.  We have to think that the average Swede would make the same choice.

It was time now to follow our standard vacation routine of wandering around until we stumble upon a dinner plan.  Tonight we stumbled upton Italian food.

We managed to get back to our place at a reasonable enough hour for some of us to take on some blogging and other to get a little bar hopping in the hotel lounge.

There was little reason to beleive that we would be able to get up the next morning after such a drawn-out travel day and be ready for a kayak tour.  But these were Louise’s plans, and, sure enough, we were up and out by 10 a.m. (4 a.m. EST), and on the water of the town’s narrow harbor.

This is truly a testament to our host’s sheer force of will, and all five of us benefitted from hearing stories that covered various parts of the estuary and even some of the small islands  between the banks.  Taking a kayak tour was also something Louise had wanted to do for a long time, but she didn’t feel like her parents were up for the trip.

Having seen Ahus from the water, we hopped back on land to hit a few of the spots she missed showing us yesterday.  These included the city library, which has a very efficient way to process its book loans.  “I don’t know why I get so excited about these things!” she said as she was checking out a book.  “But I do!”

Getting excited is something Louise is very good at.   She shared this skill a little later in the morning by bringing us to the famous Otto Glas ice cream stand on the town square.  Most everyone was excited about this.  The flavors selected ranged from pear and egg liquor, pear and melon, and elderbery with lime ripple and coconut.

You get to choose two flavors per one-scoop serving, but really you’re getting two scoops — Louise says you can get this brand of ice cream in Stockholm, but they are not nearly as generous with the servings in the capital.  And it’s put in a big homemade waffle cone.  And it’s all dipped in a chocolate sauce that turns into a hard shell.   I’m sure you can sense the excitment this caused.

Next, it was back to touring.  We got on our borrowed bikes and visisted the two beaches we missed yesterday.  Beaches are one of the three things Ahus is best known for.  The population of the city swells by a third in the summer because of all the beachgoers.  We rode through several neighborhoods of homes that looked sturdy enough to live in all year, but probably were mostly used during beach season.

Then, right on the beach, there are tiny houses that families have built decades ago.  Although you can’t build new ones anymore, the old ones are allowed to stay.  Louise pointed out her favorite, a white one with an orange roof that was hosting a family gathering as we walked by.

In between the two beaches we needed to portage our bikes a mile or so through a forest.  Again, no complaints from anyone in our camp.  It started to rain a bit.  Still, we were all happy campers.  The momentum of Louise’s excitement carried us all through.

After another meal at Louise’s parents’ house and a quick trip to the grocery store, we were ready to head off on the next leg of our trip.  Louise saw us off at the bus stop and we reversed the last part of our trip from yesterday.

Then we had a quick train trip to meet the train that would take us to Stockholm, four hours away. We had gotten so used to traveling by bicycle — and to having Louise’s authentic Swedish comfort food —  that it was difficult to leave.  She assured us, though, that there would be plenty of cool things to see in Stockholm.  We are already lowering our expectations when it comes to ice cream servings.

The light faded slowly as we watched bustling Swedish towns and sprawling wheat fields go by.  It didn’t get dark until just before we arrived in Stockholm, around 10:30 p.m.  We managed to find our accommodations, a slightly more difficult task than you might think.

We are relying on wifi to keep us informed, so street navigation is not as smooth as it would be if we constatnly tied into the Internet.

We found our place, though.  It’s a hip hostel still buzzing with young people in the lobby when we arrived after 11.  We have a six-bunk room to ourselves, and it has its own bathroom.  We’re hoping to get up relatively early to explore the city, but all bets are off given our late bedtimes and the fact that Louise and her dynamism are several hours away.

Things have started off very auspiciously for our

Scandinavian trip.  Starting at 2:30pm yesterday, we managed to successfully connect one bus (to the airport), two flights (to Iceland then to Copenhagen), a train to Sweden, and a bus to the seaside.  We succeeded in wrangling all our baggage into one checked bag (a large backpack), and five “personal items”, in order to avoid the

outrageous baggage fees charged by Play Airlines.  (We were a little nervous about the personal items, but we all managed, with some difficulty, to shove them into the sizing check slot.  Jury is still out on whether we’ll be able to pull this off again for the trip home.)  A mere 20 hours of so after leaving our house, we were stepping off the bus in Ahus.  The sun was shining and the air was crisp and cool.

 

We’re in Ahus visiting our dear friend (and Lanie’s violin teacher) Louise, who grew up here and is back visiting for the summer.  She and her parents have already, in the span of less than a day, given us a tremendous amount of delicious food and warm hospitality.  Louise has much to show us and is not one to let the grass grow under her feet, so after a quick welcome meal she showed us to the five bikes that

she’d managed to borrow from neighbors, and we set off to explore the town.  After a long travel day, it was wonderful riding through the sunshine on the picturesque, bike-friendly streets.  (The biking presented a bit of difficulty for vertically-challenged Lanie, but she soon became a pro at getting the bike started even when her feet couldn’t reach the ground.)

Louise’s family has lived her for generations, and she had a story to tell about almost every building we passed.  We

got a behind-the scenes tour of the town’s church, which dates from 1160, from Louise’s friend Jurgen.  We saw the harbor front, and the town square, and the Absolut Factory, which is right in the center of town.  (Alas, there were no English language tours that met our schedule.)  We saw the ancient ruins in the middle of town, which the enterprising Ahusians have turned into an open air cafe.  We went to one of the three beaches in town, and walked out on a long, long pier and dipped our toes (only our toes) in the frigid water — frigid even by our NH standards, though there were a few brave swimmers.  (Zoe considered going for a swim.  She was deterred not by the water temperature, but by the multitude of jellyfish that floated through the lagoon.  Louise thought they weren’t the stinging kind, but was not totally positive about it.)  We located our quaint B&B, right near the waterfront, and got ourselves checked in.  After a night on the plane with very little sleep, we really didn’t think we’d still be going strong at this point, but Louise is a bundle of energy and fortunately it proved to be contagious.

Having squeezed in pretty much everything we could for the

day, we headed back to the Kandles’ house for dinner.  Louise and her mother spent all day yesterday preparing a Swedish meatball feast, and everything was delicious.  We all ate way too much.  SInce it was now after 9pm, Louise decided we’d have to hold off on the Swedish yard games, but it’s good to have something to look forward to tomorrow.