With a busy day planned today, we were out of the apartment at 8 AM.
Maintenance crews in orange jumpsuits were out and about, obliterating any sign of vegetative life that dared take hold in the cracks.
We walked over to Katarina-Sofia to get some breakfast. Bicycle rush hour seemed to be just getting started, and the bike lanes were starting to get crowded.
Our breakfast destination was Greasy Spoon; I had some excellent Scotch Pancakes.
After eating, we roamed a few blocks over to Fotografiska and popped in for a quick look around. I didn't get any photos of it, apparently, so here's a parking garage dug into solid rock, and the view from the top of the stairs that lead down to where Fotografiska is (out of frame, to the right).
A large chunk of the museum space was closed for installation of a new exhibit, so it seemed less like a museum and more like a giant restaurant/cafe with some photos on the floor below it.
The view from the cafe windows was lovely, though.
Down at the waterfront directly in front of Fotografiska, we planned to get on the Hop-On/Hop-Off boat, and ride that over to Djurgården, but it had just started running and we would have had to wait half an hour for the boat.
Instead, we walked over to the cruise terminal, got on the Hop-On/Hop-Off bus instead, and rode that around to the island.
We de-bussed at the ABBA Museum, and investigated the offerings.
Admittance wasn't covered by our Stockholm pass, and we didn't feel the value proposition made sense, so we chose to spend our time elsewhere.
Instead, we walked over to the Vasa Museum, which is "one of the world's foremost tourist attractions" (according to their pamphlet).
The Vasa museum, as the name suggests, is all about the Vasa, a warship that sank in Stockholm harbor in 1628 within half an hour of being launched.
It was raised to the surface in 1961, and carefully preserved/restored for our viewing pleasure.
We watched a short documentary about the history and story of the ship (and its demise), and then explored the exhibits around it.
The story of the Vasa is truly incredible. Go read the Wikipedia article. Seriously.
It's also impressive that they've managed to turn what was essentially a national embarrassment into an amazing tourist attraction.
As the documentary film stated (in other words) at its conclusion, if the Vasa hadn't been such a colossal failure... we wouldn't be able to see it today.
The thing is so big that I couldn't get all of it into a single frame, and there are 4 or 5 viewing levels in the museum.
They also have dozens (hundreds?) of artifacts on display, in addition to the ship's longboat and some skeletons that were found in and around the wreck.
After leaving the Vasa museum, we went next door to check out the Nordic Museum.
We did a rather quick pass through this museum, starting with a short video about its history.
After the Nordic Museum, we had one other planned event for the afternoon, which was the Under the Bridges of Stockholm tour. It was several hours until we planned to do that, so we tossed around a few ideas.
Sabrina and I were at our museum quota for the day, but Michael and Sarah still had a thirst for knowledge; they headed off to the Nobel Museum, while we enjoyed a tree-lined stroll over to Skansen.
We weren't much in the mood to absorb the "living history" part, but we meandered around the open-air museum, enjoying the summer weather.
I got a snack at the working bakery in the old town square, and sat for awhile in the shade to enjoy a beer.
With no real objective, we roamed along the paths, slowly making our way down to the main entrance (we had started at a side entrance).
Skansen also has an aquarium and a zoo; we caught the edge of the zoo, apparently, because there were monkeys running around in one area along our route.
The main entrance/exit brought us out back at the ABBA museum, where we had started our tour of Djurgården almost 5 hours before.
We walked down to the water, to see what our options were for crossing over to Strömkajen (where we had taken the boat tour yesterday), to meet Sarah and Michael. The Hop-On/Hop-Off boat appeared to go the wrong way, and the particular ferry we could use wasn't departing for 30 minutes, so we walked back up to the main road and took the tram back to the mainland.
The boat tour was similar to the one from yesterday, as it's the same company and same boats, but this tour went around Gamla Stan and headed to the locks that separate Lake Mälaren from the Baltic Sea.
The water level in the lake is several feet higher than the salt water, so it takes a few minutes for the boat to traverse the locks as the levels equalize.
The tour did a lap around Riddarfjärden (the bay), while the recorded narration talked about the sights on the western side of Gamla Stan.
Apparently the view from the top of this tower, part of city hall, is lovely. It's very close to the train station, but we had our luggage with us when we were nearby, so it didn't work out.
Some locals were practicing their rock-climbing skills above the water, which seems like a reasonable safety net to me.
After the tour, we returned to the apartment to refresh before dinner. Last night, we had passed by a few promising options, and we chose an Italian restaurant (Agaton) just a few blocks from the apartment.
Tomorrow morning, we have a few more things to see before checking out and heading to the train station. Our ride to Copenhagen departs around 12:30 PM.
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