Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
22nd July Stockholm
We drove up the middle of lower Sweden to a town called Vaxjo where we camped for the night. The camp was one of the worst we had stayed in but it was beside a picturesque lake and it was very beautiful having our breakfast down beside it in the morning.
The landscape around here is mainly bush, forestry, interspersed with a few farms and many lakes. The ground is very rocky with poor looking soils. The road we have been travelling is fenced on either side with a 2 meter high netting fence to keep moose and deer off the roads. They are apparently a major hazard.
We went to visit a moose (elk) park to see them up close. They are certainly huge. It was interesting to learn they have two babies every year - maybe we should be crossing them with our red deer.
As we got closer to Stockholm the soils improved and we were back to large scale cropping.
Today is the 23rd of July - Liam’s birthday!!!! He is 12 today.
We took the train into town and then a ferry over to one of Stockholm’s many islands to visit the world’s oldest open air museum called Skansen opened in 1891. It has a large collection of buildings and displays depicting various aspects of life in historical Sweden, from farming in different parts of the country to craftsmen doing their particular skills like glass blowing, engineering, bakery and furniture making. There was also displays of Sami lifestyles (the people that farm reindeer in the north) and a small zoo with moose reindeer, bears, wolves, wolverines and also farm animals. Everyone really enjoyed it and we spent 4 hours there.
Later on we walked round the town and Vanessa and Liam went to the Musik Museet where there was a collection of 6000 instruments and you could play some of them. d*** and I had a beer in a cafe while they were in there. We went to visit the Royal Palace but it was perhaps one of the ugliest palaces we had seen, however they had a museum of the royal armoury and carriages free for children and Vanessa and Liam enjoyed seeing that. We walked through Gamla Stan (the old town) and then decided to head back to camp.
Later after dinner back at camp 3 very friendly Austrian students came and offered us a beer and stayed chatting for about 3 hours till the rain drove us off to bed. It is one of the great things about camping - getting to know fellow travellers and learning about their lives.
The next day we were off to Norway..
- comments