Today was lovely. We arrived in Stockholm at 10:00 and boarded our bus. The first thing we visited was the Vasa Museum. The Vasa is a huge wooden ship built in the 1600's that was going to lead the Swedish ships to Poland, where the king of Sweden was waiting for them to help in his war against the Poles. Well, the woodcarvers got a little carried away in the construction of the ship and made it very top heavy. It sank in the Stockholm harbor within 15 minutes on its maiden voyage. Only within the last 20 years did they bring it up, restore it (along with the skeletons of those drowned) and build a mother of a museum. It arouses an inordinate amount of national pride considering the first puff of wind knocked the damn thing over.
Then we went to old town, and to the armory, where it became apparent that when fully armored, a horse could not possibly walk, nor could its rider move at all. Interesting, but a monument to man's insanity.
The weather was beautiful today, about 80 and sunny. The Swedish archipelago has 30,000 islands, and we are passing nearly 1000 of them on our way out of Stockholm and back into the Baltic, on our way to Helsinki. This is the most beautiful passage imaginable. I have to keep telling myself that while these little islands with their very occasional cottages look so inviting in the summer, the winters are horrid. So I haven't bought any property so far. This is a WONDERFUL experience in a part of the world I never would have come to had it not been for Pam. It's just beautiful.
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