Well, we had a pretty good weekend in Stockholm. The getting there was not exactly great - our flight was delayed by an hour, and then we spent another 45 minutes waiting to take-off. After we finally arrived at Arlanda airport, we decided to get a taxi into town - big mistake. There were four of us, so a taxi was cheaper overall than using the hideously expensive Arlanda Express rail service. However, we hadn't reckoned on Friday afternoon traffic conspiring with roadworks and a nasty road traffic accident to make our journey into the city centre excruciatingly slow. I hate travelling by car at the best of times. On this occasion I was sorely tempted to just jump out and walk. Please bring back congestion charging in Stockholm!
So, I was not in the best of moods when we finally arrived at our hotel - over an hour and a half after leaving Arlanda. However, the weather was lovely and sunny, so we wandered-off to find somewhere pleasant to have a good drink. Fortunately, we found the perfect place at Tehuset under the elm trees in Kungsträdgården. Sitting in the half-shade of the early summer sunshine, it didn't take long to get rid of the "anti-holiday" feeling.
The next day we had glorious weather again, so we took a little train trip to the spa resort of Saltsjöbaden about 15km south east of the city on the edge of the archipelago. After a very pleasant wander along the boardwalks around the attractive harbour, we took a slightly tortuous bus-train-train-bus journey to Nacka Strand at the entrance to Stockholm harbour. This recent marina development has a great restaurant and terrace by the harbour, so we took advantage and had a delicious al fresco lunch of some of our favourite Swedish food - gravad lax and löjrom. We finished off our excellent outing with a boat trip back to the city.
Although we have now been to Stockholm 15 times in the past 9 years we never seem to tire of it. There are still loads of places I want to see and things I want to do.
Ven (or Hven in Danish and old Swedish) is a small island in the middle of the Öresund strait between Sweden and Denmark. We decided to go there for a day trip on our visit to Copenhagen, and had a lovely time.
