Day 12, 29th June 2019 – Stockholm, Sweden

Only one more sleep aboard ship and then the next leg of the holiday starts. Not quite sure where the last few days have gone! Disembarkation has to be before 6 am or after 8 am as in-between the ship relocates to its home berth for the embarkation of new passengers. We are currently docked at the ferry terminal. Lots of truck trailers waiting to be moved on to them.

Sweden is comprised of 24,000 islands and I think I must have seen most of them coming in. I was up at3 for the 3.36 sunrise, which didn’t happen as way too much cloud. But the islands had started and they continued for the next 4 hours as we cruised on up to Stockholm. Would have been lovely to see if the sun had been out, lots of conifers and on the outlying islands an occasional house of 2. Closer in they became more built up and nearly every house has a flag pole.

Anyway, today’s tour was of the city and the Vasa Museum. The Vasa is an amazing ship considering it sank on its maiden voyage and then was left underwater for 333 years. After salvage she was continually sprayed, for 17 years, with polyethylene glycol to replace the water in the oak structure. Once the Vasa got to that point a building was erected around her and is the most visited museum in Scandinavia. It is temperature controlled and low lighted, but very interesting, there were 7,000 carvings on her. However, they haven’t yet worked out how to stop the slip, she is resting on, from disintegrating in the future, but are sure they will work it out before it does!

The weather was quite cold and dull when we started, but had blue skies and sunshine when we exited the Museum.

Did a little more driving and then back to the ship. As this is a new port the driver and guide weren’t sure which gate we had to go back through as all of them were labelled for ferries. We did get through eventually, but then had to drive around all the truck-trailers, which were waiting. Lunch, a read, blog writing and then dinner and bed. Not sure what time breakfast is on offer tomorrow, but I’ll do my packing while the ship is relocating!

 Sunrise, not. lol
The original stern and it’s reconstructed model