The Archive

The home stretch

It's Sunday. A day of rest.

Seeing the rest of Stockholm, that is.

We'd decided to get out of town this morning and had plotted to go and catch a ferry to the current out-of-town residence of the Swedish royals - Drottingholm.

This meant 4 things.

1. A chance to see a new, fat sight.
2. An opportunity to see a bit of Swedish countryside.
3. The very important ability to get onto a boat whilst on holiday.
4. A final go at trying to pull a princess.

So we wandered over to the ferry port to catch the boat, just in time to watch the last boat of the day disappear past the headland.

Bugger.

Fear not. The problem on holiday has not been devised which we have not so far been able to overcome through the frivolous haemorraging of money.

We got a cab to Drottingholm.

In fairness, it was a pretty major sight so worth the investment, and the cab actually turned out to be not much different to the ferry fare anyway. So we win! Hurrah!

When we arrived, Drottinghold was, well, how can we put this... a cut price Versailles.

See...



And no princesses in sight. What a swizz.

Still, on the plus side we managed to get ourselves onto the ferry for the trip back, and enjoyed a quite lovely meal afloat, chugging around a variety of picturesque Swedish islands and learning about Swedish history - featuring our favourite chapter - the sudden and unexpected increase in interest rate... to 500%.

Ooh, you can feel that right in the mortgage can't you?

Other interesting features included the social security system that paid you 70 or so percent of your previous salary if you became unemployed. As Wig rightly pointed out "all you need is one good job and you're set."

It's that kind of thing that leads to 500% interest rates, it turns out.

Anyway, we soon pulled back into Stockholm to ready ourselves for the evening.

But what to do in Stockholm on a Sunday evening. Not a great deal, it turns out.

Fortunately for us, we managed to find a really nice little Swedish restaurant/bar which served about 70 different Swedish beers, which we tried, and failed, to drink all of.

Plus, moose meatballs.

Fantastic.

The meal was truly splendid, the atmosphere lovely and it was all in all a rather excellent way to spend a last meal in Stockholm.

And now, time to finish the job on Spy Bar. Surely they could not keep us out this time. It was bound to be quiet. We were sober. We were even reasonably well dressed. There was absolutely no reason for them to reject us.

It was closed.

You win, Spy Bar. For now.

So we had a few drinks in a lovely bar called East before retiring at a reasonable hour to bed.

Don't worry, we're nearly there. Just a morning to go before the flight that Pellet gave Wig very specific details about booking.

But wait... this is Wig we're talking about.

"Um, you know that flight that was supposed to be at 12, so we could all get back home do various things?"
"Yeah,"
"Well I booked us on a completely different flight."

Well, it was only a couple of hours difference, and it beats booking a hotel in the wrong town, I suppose.

The good news, we managed to get the flights changed, went to the airport in good time and, glory be, got home nice and early.

What a super trip. Thank you Sweden.

posted by Peter The Great @ 7:19 PM