Our Baltic Cruise: Stockholm, Sweden

Hang in there ... we're nearly done with the travelogue!

On Thursday, June 23rd, we arrived in Stockholm, Sweden shortly after 7:00 AM for a brief stop of only a few hours - not enough to really see, appreciate, and enjoy a beautiful city - especially on a warm and beautiful day. Here are a few pictures ...

This was a view across the harbor from where the Regal Princess was moored. You can see what a gorgeous day it was for a visit ...

Here are a few photos showing some of the sights we saw as the ship navigated the Stockholm harbor and the incredibly complex Stockholm archipelago, which consists of some 30,000 islands of varying sizes and shapes. The Regal Princess took several hours to thread its way through the vast maze of the archipelago, often seeming to narrowly miss bits of land.

Our tour of Stockholm consisted mainly of a short visit to the Royal Palace (Kungliga Slottet) ... not the one where the Swedish royal family lives, but where the king and the crown princess work. It's a pretty popular tourist destination, as you can see from this picture of me with a few other sightseers waiting for the doors to open ...

Along with the usual collection of antiques, statuary, tapestries, and other such royal stuff, the palace contains a large hall used for formal state banquets (including the annual Nobel Prize awards dinners) and a Hall of State used for official receptions and the occasional dinner and dominated by the Silver Throne - which, as it happens, was manufactured in Augsburg, Germany! I thought the most interesting room was this one, used by the king for official meetings with his government ministers - the two chairs at the head of the table are for the king and crown princess, and the books down the center of the table are copies of the Swedish constitution, readily available for reference as needed. Compared to the US Constitution, it appears to be a pretty large document ...

Sadly, I wasn't able to get many useful pictures within the palace, as flash photography was not allowed.

After the tour of the palace, we had a mere 45 minutes* to explore the surrounding area of Gamla Stan, the old city. It was a beautiful place, filled with colorful buildings, narrow streets, and vast crowds of tourists ...

I loved this slightly chaotic flower shop in a narrow street just down the hill from the palace ... 

And sidewalk cafes are nice, but nicer when there's a bit more sidewalk ...

Should we ever manage to get back to Stockholm for a longer visit (and I hope we can), I think a little advance study might be in order so that we can more thoroughly appreciate the country ...

Not wishing to miss our bus (the ship was going to sail on time, with or without us, according to the captain's much-repeated warning), we stuck fairly close to the square in front of the palace, where we spotted this stern sentry, whose main function seemed to be gently shooing tourists out of the street ...

Our bus was due to pick us up at 12:10, and at a few minutes before noon we heard a blare of marching music: two mounted police officers trotted up the hill from the harbor to the palace square, followed by a marching band ...

and a formation of armed soldiers. By sheer luck, we'd managed to be on hand to see the daily changing-of-the-guard parade ...

The parade put a temporary hold on the intricate ballet of tour buses arriving and departing from the palace square, which was packed with vast crowds of tourists swarming in all directions. It seemed miraculous that we somehow found the rest of our group ("Purple 6") and our bus, and equally miraculous that no one was run over by any buses.

Stockholm is a beautiful city in which we could easily have spent days seeing all the available parks, museums, palaces, and other worthy sights, while guarding against the omnipresent pickpockets. It was a shame that we had only a few hours to visit, much of it spent on a bus rather than on the streets or in the museums.

Tomorrow we come to the end of the Baltic cruise travelogue with our return to the city of Copenhagen, Denmark, and our adventures therein. Hope to see you then.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* Less time for the routine old-guy pit stop.