Stockholm, Sweden Day 2

This is our hotel, the Best Western Time Hotel.

So for the last day of our trip, we did another 18 000 plus steps through the city. We are not agreeing on Copenhagen verses Stockholm as the best cities on our trip. I liked Copenhagen, but I think Stockholm is much more beautiful. They’re both expensive and neither city seems to be able to agree on what identifies their culinary style, but we’re pretty much used to that in Canada.

Water plays a dominant role in Stockholm as there are threads of waterways through most of the downtown area. We didn’t make it on a boat trip, but we were totally satisfied that we did all of our sightseeing on dry land.

Today’s major attraction was the Changing of the Guard at the Royal Palace. We found a spot along the viewing route early enough to get a prime position from where the Marine Band, that was prominent in this ritual, centred their concert. The whole ceremony took the better part of an hour and when the band came to perform in front of us, one of the numbers in their repertoire was ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All. PERFECT!


For lunch, we chose a nice outdoor café on the very picturesque Gamla Stan square of the Noble Museum. The girls had pizza and Tony & I had Swedish vealballs with mashed potatoes and lingonberries.

Following lunch, we made our way back to our hotel, where a slow time was once again in order. We did some pre-packing and discovered that we were going to be OK with our original bags. This, actually, was not a shopping trip – quel domage!
For dinner this evening we headed out shortly after 7:00 to a restaurant recommended by the front desk of our hotel. This restaurant served Swedish cuisine and apparently didn’t need reservations. Not true!

So we set out in search of some other suitable restaurant, when low and behold, what did we wander by, but the Hard Rock Café. They had room and we all enjoyed a fabulous non-Swedish meal. I mean, if we really want to eat Swedish, we can go IKEA, right? HRC to start the trip! HRC to finish it! I’m liking the symmetry of that.
Since it never gets dark here, we felt like it was about 4:00 when we finished eating. But, we knew tomorrow was going to be a long and early one, so we returned to hotel and called it a night.

This will be the last post for this edition of Bill and Dawn’s Excellent Adventures. We had another amazing one and are very grateful for all of our travel opportunities.
See you next time!