22nd July, Cuban crew arrive.

Infamous 5

Abba Museum

Palace

Christine enjoying the boat trip

Vasa.

Interesting lattice spire.

Christine was first up and, having heard me the previous night saying yellow marina bicycles were available with the code 4321 had helped herself to a black one which wasn’t locked and far better quality than the marina ones and gone off exploring. In her pyjamas. Others emerged and cups of tea were had followed by showers and porridge, Christine returned, unarrested. My shore power had stopped working and pulling the cable connections to pieces revealed a wire out pulled out of it’s rusty socket. This was fairly simply replaced but it still didn’t work. I suspected the far end which is plugged into the shore end which has a Kwh counter on it but has always looked a bit dodgy so cut this out and went to re wire the plug without it, which revealed another dodgy connection and rustier fitting. This was more challenging but eventually succumbed, not without putting rusty streaks on my clean shirt. Upon plugging this in, still no volts. The third problem turned out to be the shore power socket itself, once changed we were back to normal. Hooray.

This wasted some time and we all chose yellow steeds from the bicycles actually belonging to the marina this time, most of which worked in the essentials but all having individual idiosyncracies, or, possibly, character.  We made our way to the old town and wandered around, the guard were changing at the palace, only 6 at a time and possibly they change every few minutes for the spectacle. We followed Sue our tour guide for the morning who had a lonely planet book and we went around the sites, it’s a very pretty part of town, lots of old, medieval old, buildings and closes and lots of little individual shops, many closed.  Lots of tourists and walking tours. Christine had spotted a cafe with bags of empty oranges outside and had looked at the prawn sandwiches which had appealed to her appetite on the way in and on the way out we stopped for coffee orange juice sandwiches and  cinammon buns  for a light snack to see us through ‘til lunch time. We’d only ordered 2 sandwiches but having tried twice to decline a third which kept appearing at the table after Christine had initially shown interest in it thinking it might have been hers (unlikely as Colin was still ordering), a toasted salmon job, we politely accepted it and ate that too. Very good sandwiches. Very good orange juice. The had boxes of oranges which went through those rotating juice producing orange squasher machines and into a bucket then  poured into cups and put in the fridge for a few minutes before being bought and quaffed.

After a bit more pottering I was keen to do a river touristy cruise as we’d done one in Copenhagen with the Maddoxes which had been excellent. We found a sales lady and one was to leave in an hour which we booked but from a different place. We made our way to said different place, bought some ice creams and water and relaxed in the shade of some trees on a lawn in an avenue between two roads, it was another beautiful day and, in the sun, very hot.

On the boat we all picked up earphones and found a table to sit around. Most of us then had to go back to change the earphones for ones which were actually compatible with our telephones. The tour took us around a couple of islands and the earphone commentary from an app on the phones nearly worked quite well but not quite nearly enough so after a bit most of us gave up on it relying on the one coming out of the speakers instead. A relaxing hour was had, we may have had a beer too before being decanted back on to the quay side having been involved in a near miss just at the end when another, smaller, tour boat had tried to come out from under a bridge as we were docking across it’s face.

I was keen to do the Vasa museum as several people have told me it’s excellent so we cycled back to it, which is about 100 yards from our marina, and all bar Graham went in, Graham having done it before. The Vasa is the Swedish equivalent of the Mary Rose, she’d been built in the 1600s and sank less than a mile into her maiden voyage having insufficient stabiltiy to stay the right way up in a puff of wind. It appears that the King had interfered a bit in her building and an  added extra gun deck and high stern castle and they  hadn’t enough buoyancy to take enough ballast  to keep her stable. Too narrow, shallow and tall probably. All a bit sad but two take aways were that; had she been normal she’d not have been found and salvaged from the harbour in 1959 and had Stockholm not been dumping all it’s rubbish and sewage into the harbour, depleting the water of Oxygen she would not have been preserved nearly as well. She is almost complete having had decades of restoration and sits, ghostly, in the dark air conditioned, humidity controlled museum as a fine  monument to all the divers, archeologists and scientists involved in her restoration, many techniques being pioneering,  she looks complete and is 92 % complete with just 8% of bits having been replaced to make her look ship shape. Again the museum was splendidly presented with loads of exhibits and interactive displays to keep people interested.

From here we went back to Yemaya for a nice cup of tea followed by a Gin and we then went out to a local restaurant for a good, if expensive,  dinner. We had been going to go to the Abba museum but were all a bit museumed out by the time it might have worked, however we went after dinner to wander about the area and took some photos at the entrance.