Favourite 2012 travel photos – Drottningholm Palace, Stockholm. July 2012
Drottningholm Palace
Sweden
Lazy Sunday in Uppsala
Favourite 2012 travel photos – Uppsala train station on a lazy Sunday afternoon in July.
SkyView
Ericsson Globe. Stockholm, Sweden. July 2012
Sunday in Uppsala
A Sunday morning in late July seemed like the perfect time to visit Uppsala, the fourth largest city in Sweden. Home to about 140,000 people, it’s a university town located about a 45 minute train ride north of Stockholm. We arrived to a very quiet place ready for some exploring with no itinerary or plans in mind.
A quick walk from its newly refurbished train station and we’re at the Fryis River which cuts Uppsala in half. It’s a beautiful walk along the river and a great way to start exploring the town:
Vasa and Skansen
For our second full day in Stockholm, I turned the itinerary planning over to my love and she came up with two things I wouldn’t have if left to my own devices. At the end of the day, I was very grateful for her insistence on seeing the Vasa Museum and Skansen.
We started the day with a short streetcar ride to Djurgården to time our arrival for the opening of the Vasa Museum. A few minutes after entering, I was so very glad this was included in our plans. The museum houses Vasa, a Swedish warship built in the early 1600s. Before getting into the fascinating story of the ship, here she is:
A taste of reindeer
This trip to Scandinavia wasn’t really a foodie trip for me. That had nothing to do with the cuisines of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, all wonderful and worth exploring, but more the economics of eating out repeatedly over a 14 day trip in some very expensive countries. In prioritizing what I wanted to try in Sweden, reindeer was at the top of my list. I managed two tastes on the same day. The first came at Skansen when I stepped up to order a #4:
Gamla Stan in photos
Gamla Stan, the original site and old town of Stockholm, has a charm that keeps drawing you back. Its narrow, winding streets, lined with shops, cafes and restaurants, are an unmistakeable tourist draw. Here are some photos of Gamla Stan as we experienced it a few times over our four days in Stockholm.
Palaces, Royal history and Globes – Day One in Stockholm
I’m ready for the first full day in Stockholm. This is partially because I forgot to pull the blackout drapes closed the night before and our east facing room became bathed in daylight before 4am. It’s also because we get our day started with a pretty substantial Swedish breakfast. This is the morning I came to wonder where lingonberries have been my whole life.
On our “must see” list in Stockholm is Drottningholm Palace. Located about 40 minutes outside central Stockholm and easily reached by metro and bus, it feels like we’ve arrived somewhere very far away from a large urban metropolis. It’s about 10am and I’m struck by the peacefulness and lush green surroundings:
Gluten-free eating in Sweden
Before writing more about our time spent in Sweden, I feel compelled to write about the wonderful options for gluten-free eating in this great country. My fiancée was diagnosed with Celiac a number of years ago. On our travels in non-English speaking countries, this has made for a few difficulties while eating out. Sometimes we have to simply leave a restaurant, sometimes my love is on the receiving end of a dirty look or an uninspiring meal while I go to town on a delicious dish she can’t have. Not so in Sweden. At every eating establishment we visited, there was an immediate understanding of Celiac Disease and the requirement for strict gluten-free food. Everyone was good enough to warn us about possible cross-contamination if any items were fried in oil used for other non-gluten-free items. You come to expect that level of service at nicer restaurants, but on this trip, a true sense of the ease of gluten-free eating came from visits to a couple of fast food places and cafes.
Not the kind of place we’d normally visit while traveling, but when your partner hasn’t had a fast food hamburger in more than three years, McDonald’s becomes a bit of a novelty. So much of a novelty, that on our arrival we dropped our bags at the hotel and made a beeline to the first set of golden arches we saw. Here are the gluten-free versions of their double cheeseburger and Big Mac. Taste-wise, they’re authentic to the regular burgers. The buns are actually pretty good:
Second stop: Stockholm
When we booked our trip to Scandinavia, I didn’t quite grasp the size of the geography we were about to traverse. Leaving Copenhagen behind, we boarded a high speed train for the 5+ hour journey to Stockholm. The train trip was a relaxing way to spend an afternoon. The scenery of Sweden zipped past the window while I sat back and flipped through a magazine, listened to music and read part of a book. When we pulled into the central station in Stockholm, I was ready for the next four days in the Swedish capital. Over that time, we were planning to see Royal palaces, a couple of unique museums, take a day trip to Uppsala, and to sample some Swedish delicacies (of particular interest to me was reindeer).
When I think back on my very first impressions of Stockholm that night, I was struck by the dichotomy of how foreign it appeared to my eyes (the architecture of Gamla Stan, the language on a menu – it didn’t look like anywhere I had been before), yet how familiar, comforting and welcoming it felt. My traveler’s spirit made itself home here without any hesitation. I immediately knew these four days were going to be special and I would be in danger of falling in love with this place before lunch the next day. Helping that happen was this experience the next morning on a city bus trip (dog lovers will understand…):
Bluenose Traveler 