We arrived in Stockholm very early in the morning – before 7 am. I had assumed that they would let people stay in the cars and sleep in, but they did not. We again had breakfast in the station, changed money, and stashed our bags in a locker.

Stockholm turned out to be a really beautiful city. We had no special plans, so we walked from the station across a footbridge over the main river/lake/sea, from where we could see beautiful old buildings lining the water on all sides.  Unlike the smaller canals we were used to from Netherlands, this was a very wide stretch of water, and so you could see buildings for miles along the water.

We headed for the old town, located on a small island in the middle of the city. We went first to a 15th century church, but it was closed and there was construction in the area. So we then headed through the old town past some palaces and government buildings to the Grand Hotel area, where we took a boat tour of stockholm for a couple of hours. It was stunning – the city sits in and among 14 islands that are connected by various bridges and surrounded by various ocean and freshwater bodies of water. Our tour guide wasn’t really that good, but the city was terrific.

We then walked to a shopping district – a long streeet lined with stores. We ate at a cafe and looked at the stores a bit more. At one point the girls and I played on some stone lions while Phyllis and her mom were in the stores.

From there, we walked back to the old medeval part of town, with the same narrow streets and tall houses that we saw in Brussels and Amsterdam.  We stopped for ice cream and bought some food for later, and then walked back along the waterfront towards the train station. We still had several hours to kill before our train, which did not leave until midnight, but we were too tired to tackle any new part of town. So we sat in a park on the grass for maybe two hours playing cards and eating our Gouda cheese.

From there, we walked back through the shopping district and found dinner at a food court. It seemed to be a higher quality place then you would find in a food court in the US, and it seemed like lots of locals ate there after work. Amber and I had pasta, Kaitlin had chicken and rice, and Phyllis had Mexican food. Judy had Chinese.

We then headed back to the train station where we waited for several hours to catch a night train back to Copenhagen. This time, we shard out cabin with a young woman.