Day 48 Stockholm

It look at 52 minutes by train and reach the centre of Stockholm and we decided to go to the Royal Palace but we had to stop for morning tea as it was now 11am.

It was so nice to all be together as a family, Geoffrey was so happy to see us all, (I hope he is going to be happy in Chicago). We wandered through the very interesting high street in the old town with camera at the ready and many photographs were taken.

The Royal Palace was the antidote to St Petersburg. St Petersburg is so ostentations and filled with art, Stockholm on the other hand look impoverished by comparison. Instead of art they had tapestries and often nothing except silk wallpaper. It is really strange given the immense power that Sweden once had rolling over half of the Baltic reaching St Petersburg at one stage yet they seem not to have profited from it or they are just not art lovers in the way the Russians are. There was some interesting bit about the royal family and they had a collection of crowns in the treasury which was very medieval in style compared to our Royal Crowns.

After the Royal Palace we went on a quest for food and you can see quite clearly that Geoffrey was ready to eat. We found a cafe which was not busy as it was about 4pm by now. The food was okay but the company was great. We had such a laugh that day.

Afterwards we decided to go to the Nobel Museum, which was absolutely fascinating. It was far better than I ever expected sadly we ran out of time and I would happily have spent 4-5 hours in there.

We returned to the marina and we told the kids to help themselves to anything to eat as we had been invited to join Elixir so we grabbed a bottle of wine and some cheese and biscuits and joined Elixir.