Europe 25: Stockholm, Day 3

Nobody woke up early on the day after Midsommar except me and I’m not sure what that says about me but it’s probably something to do with getting old, although it could just mean that I didn’t celebrate Midsommar nearly enough when I had the chance. Could be both. It also meant that I had the kitchen to myself for a while and could have a quiet and leisurely breakfast, so I had that going for me. Eventually everyone else filtered in and the place grew lively with conversation and activity.

Our big mission for this day was to take the ferry out to Sandhamn, one of the larger islands in the archipelago outside of Stockholm. Sweden has a lot of islands – more than you’d think if you weren’t familiar with it already. The last time we visited we went to one that had a giant Cold War gun on it and spent a fascinating day touring the facility. Sandhamn is rather less bellicose than that, unless you count all of the fashionably (and more or less identically) dressed affluent young people wandering around the harbor and pregaming their evening’s clubbing, though it has to be said that they didn’t particularly take note of us when we were there so whatever aggression they might have had was probably channeled onto the dance floor.

It's a fair ride out to Stavsnäs where we would pick up the ferry. Mats drove and it was just me, Kim, and Lauren along for the ride, which meant we could all fit in one car. You have to time this sort of thing right because ferries are not like buses – they don’t run every 17 minutes even during peak hours, so if you miss it you’re kind of stuck. We thought we’d allotted plenty of time to get to Stavsnäs but we didn’t count on a drawbridge opening about halfway there. But the drawbridge eventually closed, traffic moved again, and we arrived at the dock about four minutes before the ferry started loading passengers. We even had time to park the car before hopping onto the ferry.

The ride out to Sandhamn is really lovely. It takes about an hour with stops here and there, or forty minutes if you take the express, and you just kind of cruise along watching the islands pass by. There are bigger islands that have enough space for people to live on them, and smaller islands that don’t. Sometimes they have a little lighthouse to help guide the boats through the various channels and sometimes they just have birds. Along the way you pass all sorts of little boats darting in and out between the islands. They do tend to give the ferry a fair bit of space, though. Size matters.

We enjoyed the ride.

And then we were in Sandhamn.

Sandhamn is technically the name of the larger of the two settlements on the island of Sandön, though in practice the whole island is usually referred to as Sandhamn as well. It means “Sand Harbor,” apparently, and it’s mostly a place for pleasure boaters and tourists these days – there’s about a hundred permanent residents, according to a quick internet search that I just did, but that swells to about two or three thousand during the summer months and these are joined by somewhere around a hundred thousand visitors who arrive there every year. 100,004 including us. It’s a lovely little town to walk around, and we spent some time doing just that when we first got there, exploring the harbor and looking for some lunch since it was getting on that time.

That turned out to be harder than you’d think, but eventually we ended up at a little café right by the docks where we found some sandwiches and snacks. We sent the first picture below to Oliver to let him know we were thinking of him back home.

We had a very nice view of the harbor, and afterward we wandered down to see it up close.

Sandhamn the town is one of those idyllic-looking places that pretty much require you to walk slowly through it, in part because it’s just gorgeous and you don’t want to miss any of it and in part because there’s no vehicular traffic and you really don’t have many other options especially because it is a bit hilly and nobody likes to rush up hills, or at least nobody you would want to wander around Sandhamn with anyway. So you walk, slowly, stopping every few steps to take it all in.

After a while we ended up on the Big Rock. I called it that because it is big and a rock and I’m just clever that way, but if Google Maps is to be believed it is officially called the Kvarnberget, which they translate as “Observation Deck.” I can’t say it looks like any observation deck that I’d ever been on before – those tend to be attached to buildings and/or have railings, in my experience – but the first rule of geography is that there is no accounting for place names. I took a picture of it as we were leaving the island on the ferry trip back to Stavsnäs and it looks like this:

It’s a pretty easy climb to the top, it has to be said, and from there you can in fact observe quite a bit.

We took a lot of pictures up there, including a few of us just hanging around on the Kvarnberget which is an intensely amusing word to sound out in your head, I find, and it therefore appears here more often than it probably would otherwise. Kvarnberget.

Sometimes you get to see the art being made.

From Kvarnberget we wandered away from the water and up the hill. Most of the island is heavily forested, and the trees come right up to the town of Sandhamn, which was nice on a sunny day. Eventually we got to the Sandhamns Kapell, which was not open for exploration but was interesting to look at.

Just outside of the chapel was a post, and apparently it makes a fine seat for those inclined to get just that much more altitude from which to take in the view.

And if you change the vantage for the photo, you can see the cell phone tower in the background.

From there it was an easy walk back downhill to the harbor.

We had some time before our ferry was scheduled to leave, so Kim and Mats headed off to see something that interested them while Lauren and I wandered through some of the shops that were open. We found an interesting bookstore, for example. Eventually we ended up sitting on a bench just watching the harbor and that’s where Kim and Mats found us.

When it was time we headed over to our dock and got on the ferry back to Stavsnäs. We made a beeline for the stern so we could hang out there and watch things go by.

This was the express ferry, without the various stops that we made on the way to Sandhamn, and we made good time. It was just as lovely in this direction.

After a quick stop for ice cream at the little store at the dock in Stavsnäs we headed back home for a fairly quiet evening. Dinner was mostly Midsommer leftovers without the random singing, and eventually we ended up sitting out on the porch playing Phase 10 and listening to old-school American country music – the kind of music that is more “fuck the Man” than the modern “God, guns, girls, flag” nonsense. Three cheers for Johnny Cash, is all I have to say. The fact that this was Lauren’s choice made it even better.

We did have to pause a bit to deal in the middle of that to respond to a small Crisis, though. While it was comfortably cool in Stockholm that day it was brutally hot back in Wisconsin, and when it gets too hot the bunnies need to come in from outside – they don’t handle heat very well and we did lose a bunny that way once. This required Oliver to bring in their cages as well and set them up in the basement, and the short version of this story is that he ended up missing a step and breaking his ankle – a small break, fortunately, but enough to land him in a boot when all was said and done. Fortunately our friends Christy and Molly were able to get him to the ER to get looked at, and afterward they helped him with the bunnies as well. It is good to have friends.

Back in Sweden Sara pretty much cleaned our clocks at Phase 10 and eventually we realized that it was starting to get late. This is actually difficult to tell when you’re that far north at Midsommar.

The first time I went to Sweden – also for Midsommar – I never did get the hang of meals because we’d be out doing things or just at the house hanging out with Mats and Sara and I’d be watching the sun’s position in the sky thinking, “yeah, it’s probably 4 or 5pm now and we should think about dinner” and then I’d look at a clock and it would be nearly 10pm and yeah no wonder I’m hungry. It’s a strange adjustment to make, really.