Living On A Rock
Stockholm - 24th June
Today we left our accommodation in Orebro to take up residence in Stockholm for a week. In the last week we have been skipping across Norway and Sweden from west to east, moving every day to a new location, so today we are looking forward to settling in one place, although for a short period, and not constantly being on the road.
To break up the drive we pulled off the busy E18 a few times, below are some of our stops in photos.
Arboga: translates to bend in the river, 13th century town who although they have very old buildings that have been well maintained I thought their best feature was the purple flowers. It definitely wasn’t their ability to use the local rocks and make un-uniform cobbles and lay them in jaw-jarring unevenness.
Djakneberget, Vasteras: in the 19th century a chap built a public reserve on a rock hill. He carved thoughts, names, dates, mottos and quotes into the rock and boulders; today 500 of the carvings have survived. The quote in English in the photo is not his work; that was some vandal with black paint.
Anundshog: This is the largest tumulus in Sweden, Bronze (and Iron) Age burial mound. It also has an original rune stone, and Thing place stones. The Thing place in these grounds are stones shaped into two ships, end on, and is where the governing council would have assembled for regular meetings. The grounds are supposed to have a café which would have been handy in the 24 degree heat but unfortunately it was shut so we suffered on a bottle of water.
Angso Castle: the castle is on the island of Angso in Lake Malaren and is surrounded by a reserve of many walking trails, rocks, plus flies and mosquitoes. The castle is now a museum has many maintained outbuildings, its own church and poor workers pulling weeds in the heat and constantly buzzing flies.
No photo but our last stop was at Balsta’s McDonalds for an ice cream and drink before we hit the big city of Stockholm.
We reached the 8-10 lane motorway, that goes around Stockholm, right on home time. Luckily for us most of the traffic was leaving town as we headed north to our luxury accommodation in the suburb of Danderyd.
Today’s ABBA tribute is ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’ (1979) for our contrasting accommodation over the last two nights. In Orebro we were in a small basement space, all you could see from the high up little windows was an unkempt lawn, weeds. Tonight we have a luxury apartment, built on a rock, with 180 degree views of a golf course, the sea, a marina, forest lands (hiding the big city) and a palace.
Tired of TV
I open the window and I gaze into the night
But there’s nothing there to see, no one in sight