Stockholm

Our trip from Norway to Sweden was incredibly easy, but interesting nevertheless. It required a boat, two buses, a plane and a train to get from the Barn (think it deserves a proper noun from here on out) to our hotel in Stockholm. And a trip to a Norwegian dentist so that Mike could get a root canal. But we made it to Sweden, the next country on our tour of Scandinavia.

As we sat down to write this post, we realized we didn't take many pictures here, but will do our best, starting with a nice picture of the city.

If you look closely, you'll see a row of boats on the right side of the photo. You can't tell from the picture, but they were creeping along at a snail's pace, while following a distinct, zig-zagged route. After much deliberation, we determined that it was the world's slowest, most polite regatta, which seemed appropriate given how nice and welcoming the people of Stockholm were throughout our three days there. In fact, we received our first honeymoon perk of the trip - an upgrade to the one and only Viking Suite!

The view from our balcony.

We didn't spend much time in the room though as there was a lot to see. While it's a big city, it's also very accessible, so we spent much of our time just walking around and checking out the different neighborhoods and parks (as well as the cafes and bars, of course!). We didn't even need to use any public transportation, other than express train from the Stockholm airport to the city center. Amazingly, it has a guarantee that if it is more than two minutes late, you get a full refund! The Long Island Railroad would go bankrupt if they adopted a similar policy.

One specific highlight was the Vasa Museum, which holds the preserved wreckage of the sunken Swedish navy ship of the same name. The pictures below don't do it justice and the efforts taken to preserve the ship, which sunk in 1628, are remarkable.

The story around the ship is a great one: the Vasa was built in the 17th century to be the flagship of the Swedish navy and a symbol of their military power; however, the ship was poorly designed and sunk in the harbor after traveling just over a kilometer on its maiden voyage! Their loss is our gain - it was a very cool exhibit.

We caught a few of the other touristy sights, but again, we realized we didn't have any pictures other than this one...

Yes, apparently the only site that was picture worthy is a statue of a man fighting a dragon. We did take advantage of the fact that we were there on a Saturday night and joined a pub crawl, where we met a bunch of travellers from around the world and a few Americans in the Navy who were stationed around Europe and decided to spend Labor Day weekend in Stockholm together.

A memorable night and undoubtedly our latest night so far. And believe it or not, we did manage to get a photo together at a site that one local deemed to be "the best view in Stockholm."

And with that, we were off to our final Scandinavian stop...Helsinki, Finland.