From 5 am I was up looking at the incredible scenery as we cruised into Stockholm. There are so many islands and unusual houses. I am unsure how people get around. I imagine a lot must travel on water.
We finally get to dock at the Stadsgarden cruise berth about 8.40 am which is a bit earlier than anticipated.
We have booked the Hop on Hop off bus and boat for the day. We were able to buy our tickets for US$59 each the night before.
We were off the ship by 9.15 which was very fast, but we are all on a tight timeframe as we need to be back on board by 3.30 pm.
We were taken directly to the boat to start our tour. First stop is the Vasa Museum so we get off to have a look around. Then we boarded the next boat and went to the Royal Palace. We wanted to do the whole one hour tour on the water and then change to the bus to do that loop. Unfortunately today luck was not with us and we had to get off the boat at the next stop. There was some timetabling mix up and that sent our day into chaos.
There is so much to see and so little time.
So we changed to the bus. We had to wait about 20 minutes and then we went past the Abba Museum and onto Skansen which is an open air museum complex. Strangely our bus sat here for at least 20 minutes, more of our precious time ticking by. Everyone on the bus was getting anxious as we knew that time was so precious.
Once we started again, we decided not to get off the bus and just do the full loop as we kept going past bus stops where people were waiting but there was no room for them. This plan also fell apart as, when we got to Stop 1, the bus driver announced it was his lunch time and the bus would sit for 45 minutes.
So again we looked for another bus and found one leaving at 12 noon. But it was going straight back to the ship. We got there at 12.30 pm and by this time realised we didn’t have time to do the full loop again to see anything in detail and we could not trust getting back on a bus or boat to meet our 3.30 pm deadline.
This was very disappointing as we thought Stockholm was just beautiful. It will be on our ‘do more’ list if ever we come back this way.
There were many others who made the same decision as the buffet was more crowded than normal for a port day when we went to lunch.
It was unfortunate that bad management by the bus company wrecked so many people’s day. We definitely didn’t get our US$59 worth. We only got to 3 out of the 9 boat stops. And our bus ride was nowhere near as good as the one in Helsinki yesterday. One of the drivers blamed the triathlon that was running for the mix-ups, but yesterday there was a major full marathon running and it caused very little change.
We have been lucky with tours as we have heard lots of people complaining about poor quality ship and private tours and ours have been quite good. I guess today we drew the short straw.
I still managed to take lots of photos and we saw the main attractions but didn’t get time to explore anything in depth.
The bonus was, we had at least 3 hours scenic cruising as we left Stockholm and headed for Copenhagen. What I saw in the evening was quite different to what I saw in the morning as we were on the opposite side of the river/bay. I sat on the balcony until 6.45 pm just watching the scenery. It was beautiful.
When I was young we always sang the song, ‘The wise man built his house upon the rock’ and it never made a lot of sense to me growing up in Coonabarabran. These houses now make it seem very sensible.