Stockholm

We woke up this morning in Stockholm to the always exciting sleeping leg stretch that ignites a charlie horse. Ouch! Fortunately my loving wife jumped into action to save me from my stupid leg that hasn't driven since July before this past week. I run 10-15 miles without issue, but driving a few hundred kilometers is too much apparently. C'est la vive.

Our flights home from Greece included a 19 hour layover in Stockholm after leaving Greece at 9:30 last night. Even the airport folks don't try to pretend that you're going to stay in the airport for that. We took the last Arlanda Express at 1:05 AM down to Stockholm's central station and the Hotel C right by it. Hot showers. Toilets that can handle toilet paper. A smörgåsbord for breakfast. We're back in Scandinavia, baby! Of course the airport was playing ABBA's "Gimme, Gimme, Gimme A Man After Midnight" as we ran to catch the last train.

Stockholm is a beautiful city, and we were able to leave all of our luggage at the hotel for the day while we explored it. I cannot emphasize enough the convenience of our Stockholm plan. Actually this whole vacation went off without a hitch somehow. I guess we failed to schedule an olive tour like we'd wanted to in Kalamata, but we spent more than enough time in olive groves all the same.

Our main plan for the day was to ride a ferry and to visit the Vasamuseet, which we wrongly thought was like the Vikingskipmuseet in Oslo. Actually Vasa is a monument to failure, well, how a collosal failure can be a boon to later archeaology. Now I really want to read the last remaining book I haven't read in Theodore Ayrault Dodge's "great captains" series covering Gustavus Adolphus!

Stockholm is a mostly older city than Bergen, but still quite a bit younger than everywhere we saw in Greece. And we didn't manage to find any of those bad parts of town the fearmongers allude to since Sweden has added 10% to their population with refugees. On the contrary it felt just as safe as Norway with probably less graffiti.