Saturday, June 26th, 2004: Stockholm, Sweden

N 59°,
E 018°
to Stockholm: 656 kilometres

The day starts grey and dreary. We take our leave of Pedro and Bjarne and the cats, and head off for Sweden. The 15 kilometre-long bridge/tunnel to Malmö starts just outside eastern Køpenhavn, and we are in Sweden.

Today is a major national holiday (perhaps the most important holiday of the year) in Sweden, Midsommer, to celebrate the longest-day of the year; but it doesn’t feel much like summer to us. We drive along, almost nobody else on the road. After a few hours, the sun begins to peak out from behind the clouds, and the dashboard thermometer tells us that the temperature outside is rising quickly. Finally, we need our sunglasses, and it gets to 19 degrees outside. It is even warm in the car, the sun shining through the windows.

We entered Sweden without any Swedish kroner, thinking that it would be easy to find a bank machine. But easy it is not – and when we do, we find that they are not on the network that our bank back home uses. Finally, after a number of attempts, we find a machine that will actually give us cash, and back at the highway interchange there is a restaurant that is open and at 3:30 p.m., we have some lunch.

We get into Stockholm without any problem, and easily find the apartment we have rented for 2 nights. We are located on Södermalm, a big island, primarily residential, just to the south of the main city. The apartment building is actually built on top of the subway entrance, very handy.

We park and explore the area just enough to realize that almost nothing except the 7-11 on the corner is open. We buy frozen pizza and breakfast items for tomorrow, and settle in for a night of doing nothing but watching TV.