The Stockholm Archipelago

Today we took an early boat out of Stockholm city, to Stockholm Archipelago. Since Anna is the kind of person who plans a holiday without checking when her passport expires and gets stuck in Eastern Europe with an expired passport, of course we were running through town from the bus stop to the ferry stop and jumped on the ferry just before it took off.

Since the morning air was quite cold, running was not a bad thing to get us warmed up. But we still needed plenty of insulation to protect us from the wind, especially on the boat ride, don't let the perfectly blue sky and bright sun fool you into thinking it was warm!

We jumped off the ferry on the island of Grinda, which used to be used mainly for farming before it was bought by the Stockholm Archipelago Foundation as a recreational island for the people of Stockholm. It still has a feeling of a farm.

We were meant to go to the sauna, but as you can see from the above picture, that wasn't possible. Apparently the sauna burnt down last week! No injuries. Saunas are a big part of Swedish culture, you toast yourself in the sauna and then jump into cold water to cool down before getting back into the sauna. Maybe we'll find one that's still standing before the week's up.

So instead we decided to do a little hike around the island. It's quite a small island, so the hike was not too long. There are lots of helpful signposts, but I think it'd be quite difficult to get lost.

The trees in this area seemed to be quite green for this time of year. There are so many different types of mushrooms in the forest. One particular type of mushroom which is known to be poisonous and cause renal failure and hallucinations, was apparently eaten by the Vikings before they went into battle. It made them go "crazy" and become more aggressive and they thought it made them fight better.

At this time of year, these islands are almost uninhabited. Any cafes or restaurants which may be on the island are usually closed. We were lucky enough that the hotel on the island had a conference taking place there. So the kitchen was open and they had made lunch for the conferencees. Feeding two more was not a problem, luckily for us. Since we were hungry after our hike and we had eaten our sandwiches which we'd carried with, and the ferry back to the mainland was only coming by after 16h00 and would take 2 hours to arrive in the city. After lunch we fell asleep on these couches/beds in the hotel reception in front of the fireplace. Swedes are very polite. The hotel staff may have liked to have kicked us out of their reception area, but they didn't say a word. Rather, they pretended it was an everyday occurrence that people snored on the couches in the reception area.

After the nap we had a little bit more energy and walked down to the docks where people usually park their boats in the summer. They were empty today. After enjoying the sun and imagining that we were actually the only two people on the island (it was so quiet down at the docks) we had just enough time to walk back to the south side of the island where the ferry would pick us up.

We made it back into Stockholm just as the sun was setting and headed home on the subway.