Day 1 and 2: St Louis to Gothenburg

Day 3: Shrimp and Salmon Cruise in Gothenburg

Day 4 and 5: Finishing Up in Gothenburg

Day 5 and 6: Starting our time in Stockholm

Day 7: Seeing an Opera at Drottningholm

Day 8 was a busy day! Ever since we went to the Norwegian Folk Museum in Norway the other year, I’ve become obsessed with the idea of open air museums, and this was the first on our itinerary, and also the first one, as in, THE first open air museum. (It should also be noted that I loved going to Sauder Village as a kid which is in the same vein, I suppose.) While crafting our itinerary I decided we should start the day with the nearby Vasa Museum, which everybody said was amazing, but could get crowded, plus it opened earlier.

We started our day with breakfast at Skeppbro Bakeri (again!) because it was good and was also near the ferry we wanted to take to the island of Djurgarden, our destination for the day. You could get there another way, but the ferry was fastest and seemed like fun.

I got the “breakfast buffet” (but imagine that in Swedish, I think they actually just called it frukost) which included a sandwich, pastry, juice, coffee plus yogurt, oatmeal, bread and any toppings you wanted. It was a decent deal, something like 1500 kronor if I recall, while just a sandwich and coffee would set you back 900 kronor. They had a nice sandwich roll with sliced hardboiled egg, mayo type sauce, caviar, and lettuce. We enjoyed watching the sea and the birds, and then finally headed over to the ferry to ride to Djurgarden.

The ferry is part of the regular transportation system so you can use the SJ app to buy tickets.

The ferry arriving for us.

Us, on the ferry. We sat inside because we were tired and it was quite sunny.

The ferry ride was quick and uneventful and then the whole boat got off at Djurgarden, near the amusement park called Gröna Lund. We walked over to the Vasa Museum and went straight in: I had prepurchased tickets online that morning, so we skipped the ticket line, easy peasy. The museum was already pretty crowded at whatever time it was, probably 10 am ish.

The museum is all about this one ship, called the Vasa, which was really elaborate, built in 1628, and capsized pretty much right away, though sadly a lot of people died. The whole thing is tragic and really crazy. In any case though, because of the waters that the ship sank in, it stayed fairly intact for centuries until it was finally raised up in 1961, and then the museum was built in 1990. The museum houses the ship, with lots of displays about the ship, all the parts, information about the people on the ship, etc. It’s quite fascinating, and we spent about 2 hours there…probably could have spent longer, but we felt like we had gotten a fair amount of information at that point and we had made it through most of the exhibits.

In case you were wondering! And yes, you can see them, and yes, they are just boxes without bottoms. Very comforting. (Very demure).

After we had filled our brains with Vasa information, we left to walk to Skansen, nearby. It was oddly hard for us to figure out the best to get there, possibly because there were supposedly a few entrances, but actually more exits than entrances…we found our way eventually and got there around 1 pm, and immediately decided we needed to eat lunch.

We chose Restaurant Gubbhyllan, right near the entrance, and I ordered an interesting potato and herring dish. It was very Swedish and I enjoyed it. After our lunch, we started exploring.

Oh, look, we also had cinnamon rolls! Kanelbullar.

Skansen was somehow closer together than we expected: all the buildings and houses were crammed together in places. It was overwhelming and really terrific all at once. Some of the houses/buildings had people in them dressed up in period clothing who would answer questions and talk about the house and the time. We walked all over, and ended up staying just past 5 pm, when the houses started closing and the people in them leaving.

We found our way out a little after 5, like I said, and we had 7:30 dinner reservations, so we decided to just keep moving.

We walked from Djurgarden to Ostermalm where we stopped in for a snack and a drink at A Bar Called Gemma. It was lovely to sit and we enjoyed our drinks.

We ended the night with dinner and live jazz at the Glenn Miller Cafe. It’s a french restaurant with live jazz, and they really cram you in there, plus it’s quite small to begin with!

We had a lovely dinner with mussels–we actually ended up sitting by a couple who were from Paris and said the food was very good/authentic in their opinion. After we finished dinner the jazz was starting: we enjoyed 3 sets of music by the Dölerud  Johannsen Quintet, with Dan Johannsen (the Swedish version of the name Don Johnson, really, which delighted Louie to no end) on trumpet. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, a great end to a long and full day.

Notes: you have to reserve for dinner if you want a table, and each set is charged separately: we chose to stay to the end but could have left earlier. They said you needed cash, but we were able to add the set tab to our bill–it was quite reasonable for the live music.

Afterwards, we walked back to Gamla Stan and fell asleep very easily! My feet were killing me and I was exhausted.

22, 543 steps and 9.13 miles walked, but there was a lot of museum style slow walking which can be extra tiring.

Day 1 and 2: St Louis to Gothenburg

Day 3: Shrimp and Salmon Cruise in Gothenburg

Day 4 and 5: Finishing Up in Gothenburg

Day 5 and 6: Starting our time in Stockholm

I’m sorry to say that I’m doing a blog post on only one day again today. I have a ton of pictures to go through, and I think 1 day makes that easier. It does mean drawing this whole thing out for longer, but I hope you are excited to read about my trip for longer! Hey, it beats hearing about my normal life, right? (Don’t answer that, please.)

Okay, on Day 7, we woke up feeling quite refreshed, which was great. We got coffee and breakfast at a place near our airbnb called Cafe Schweizer, and got cinnamon rolls and yogurt with cappuccinos.

They do a lot with freshly squeezed orange juice there as well. We were lucky to get two seats outside, and enjoyed the morning air. It should be noted that we opted to sit outside whenever possible on this trip, because regardless of what the weather was, it was always more pleasant than that weather in St Louis in the summer.

Anyway, today was a big day: we had a boat ride at 1 to Drottningholm Palace, and then we would be seeing an opera there in the evening and getting home close to 11. We decided to do Rick Steve’s Walking Tour of the Gamla Stan in the morning now.

I don’t know if it’s me, or Rick, or Sweden, but in the past I have found Rick Steves’ guidebooks to be invaluable, but for this trip, I found him to be less helpful and frankly, a bit judgmental. I suppose that’s his shtick, and maybe it’s me and as I’ve gotten older I’m less judgmental, but he makes a lot of snide comments about cruise passengers, comments about how the Gamla Stan isn’t the best place to sightsee and YET spend the majority of his book on places there and gives them 3 stars, and various other things. For his section on Estonia he makes a remark about how the guides wash their faces and comb their hair for the walking tours which seems a little bit…implying they are dirty otherwise…and for Finland he completely insults the entire city of Turku calling it a pale shadow of Helsinki, when we found it to be a delightful place and completely different.

In any case, I used a combination of his book, Fodor’s guidebooks, Trip Advisor, Rick Steve’s Forums, Reddit, and general internet searches trying to find blog posts that weren’t entirely click bait and paid for by the tourism industry. But Rick had a nice walking tour of the Gamla Stan and we thought we would do as much as it as we could fit into the time we had this morning.

There were a lot of people. And cruise ships can definitely and do contribute to overcrowding, but so do Rick Steves Guidebooks which leave off entire cities like Gothenburg and Turku. I will say that Sweden is certainly less busy than other places!

I guess that’s what the building looks like! Or would. I asked Louie if we could get a giant drape for our house that looks like our house and he didn’t say no outright.

Also worth noting: it’s funny how there are all of these basically pedestrian only places like the Gamla Stan, but then there will be trucks, or random vehicles driving through. Like that SUV parked there, what’s the deal with that?

The pink church is called Storkyrkan, which means…the big church. It’s right near the big square (Stortorget), so you get a sense of how people named things back in the day.

There are a lot of old organs in the world, and this was a pretty one inside the old Finnish Church.

This is the tiniest statue which is outside the church in its courtyard. I should have gotten a better sense of the scale, but that’s the head of a flower.

I just loved the Gamla Stan: the buildings, the streets, the cobblestones. It is completely unlike St Louis, and I love it.

Various doors.

And then we were back at the Stortorget, and needed more coffee, because of course. We went to a really old coffee house possibly called Grillska Huset Brodbar that was recommended in the walking tour and enjoyed coffee and probably cinnamon rolls, I don’t actually recall (fail!). We did have real coffee from a pot.

The ceilings were very elaborate!

After that it was time to walk to where our boat was taking off, which was right by City Hall. We got there with enough time for Louie to see City Hall (I already had, but I was happy to look again.)

Always look up! You never know what you’ll see on the ceilings.

We chose to take the ferry to Drottningholm Palace since that was how you originally would have gotten there. It was the summer home of the Royal Family, but where they mostly live nowadays.

Various views from the boat.

It was a pleasant ride, just under an hour, and we stayed on the top deck the whole time enjoying the views and the breeze.

Seeing the Palace for the first time!

Anyway, we unloaded ourselves from the boat and headed to the palace to see the inside. We had prepurchased tickets, but it probably wasn’t necessary (and truthfully, we probably could have taken the 2 pm ferry rather than the 1, but whatever.)

We did the tour self-guided, and it was pretty nice to see. I’m sure we missed out on some of the details and intricacies, but we loved seeing the rooms and the art, and the signs were helpful and most of the time there was English to read.

Very fancy bedroom. A bit fancy for my taste, though.

I loved these ceramic fireplaces found throughout and kept noticing them. (I think there were ceramic, if not, then they were made of something else.)

Like I said earlier, be sure to look up! The ceilings often had elaborate paintings on them.

What I would really have wanted to see but wasn’t on the tour: how the Royal Family lives TODAY. Like, how fancy are their regular rooms? But alas, they get that privacy and we only saw historic rooms, basically.

It’s important to have a room full of your accomplishments in battle, paintings, calligraphy, etc.

After finishing the tour, we headed into the grounds and towards another building, the Chinese Pavilion. It was a lovely day, though a bit on the sunny side. The palace and grounds weren’t Versailles but hey, the royal family still exists and didn’t get decapitated, so I’d call it a win.

This was a fun building, full of treasures from China, which was considered a fascinating paradise to the Swedes at this time. Definitely some problematic things by today’s standards, but a cool building.

More fireplaces!

There was a nifty spiral staircase to go upstairs.

Anyway, we headed out after, back to the main area and for an early dinner and coffee/relaxing. Stuff was closing around 5 and the opera was at 7, so we had that amount of time to spent on food and whatnot.

We wanted to eat dinner outside, but it was actually starting to rain, so we went inside instead. We had some soup and shrimp sandwiches and then coffee and a blueberry pie for dessert.

I’d bought these tickets quite a time before, and the cool thing is that we were seeing a really old opera (Armide by Lully) in an old theater building with the original ways to move things around, so it seemed quite fitting. And then after buying tickets I saw that it was going to be in French with Swedish subtitles, and we sort of panicked and worried about it, and then a few days before I looked again and it said Swedish AND English subtitles and we were so relieved! But honestly, we still didn’t always know what was going on, haha. It’s opera!

Edited to add: one time when I looked at the website this was what google translated: “At Drottningholm’s Castle Theatre, clothing is optional, dress in something you feel comfortable in! At premieres, it can be fun to dress up a little extra, but it is not a requirement. Also keep in mind that it gets hot in the salon during hot summer evenings and adjust your clothing accordingly.”

They weren’t wrong. The place was super hot and I sweated profusely throughout, but we did enjoy the opera tremendously. It was well done and just terrific.

We ordered “interval” snacks, and enjoyed some wine and snacks, and then spent too much time trying to find the bathrooms which were farther away than we would have liked, or possibly we missed the closer ones.

In any case, it was a terrific night, and afterwards it was raining a bit, but we found the bus back to Stockholm (the opera had a bus or perhaps more than one you could purchase tickets for that ran directly back to the main station after the show). It was a quick ride and then a short walk home. We debated making another stop that night, but I was sweating and it was humid, and we decided going home was best.

And that was the end of a long and busy day! But we had a great time, and enjoyed almost all of it. Until next time!