Stockholm Old Town waterfront

Stockholm don’t feel like a big capital city, more like a romantic city just like Venice with it’s old architecture and canals, except that Stockholm don’t have the gondola rides. Instead there are plenty of boats in the city, since it consists of 14 islands combined with many different bridges. It’s also both very green and clean, one of the cleanest capitals in the world.

There are several guided boat tours to take, as well as opportunites to hire a boat or kayak and paddle your own "gondola" and sing romantic songs for your beloved one to make this day perfect. If you don’t bring your love with you, there is always the chance of meeting someone (there is a high density of singles in this city!). Why not take an old steamboat cruise, if you want a more unusual boat cruise?

Stockholm is a city with surprisingly many restaurants because the Swedes are very fond of international cuisine, but I suggest that you find yourself one in the waterfront where you can sit and enjoy the sea breeze while different boats is passing by. Perhaps a romantic boat cruise in the evening where dinner is served aboard.

The city has numerous green parks, so if you want a more budget alternative, you could buy something to eat in a local grocery stores or covered markets, there are plenty of ready-made dishes, salads and delicacies to bring with you outdoors and have a picnic somewhere nice.

A very popular picnic place is out on Djurgården, where also many other attractions are located, such as museums, Kaknästornet (tower with great views), Skansen (outdoor museum), the amazing Wasa War Ship museum – and the amusement park Gröna Lund if you are up to a rollercoaster ride and other terrifying rides.

If you want some exercise that is not too exhausting, there is different walking tours in the city, like the ABBA city walk, Millennium tour, rooftop walks or ghost walks in the evening darkness. Or why not rent a bike from one of the many bike stands?

Stockholm is a wonderful city to explore by your own, very safe and not too big to get totally lost within either. Your chances to get a perfect day are big, but as usual: it’s your own choice to have fun or not and remember, if you’re coming here: don’t forget to tell me about it so I may help you to experience that perfect day!

Some special dates to visit:

• Around the 20th of April: the pink cherry tree’s in bloom in the Kungsträdgården making a fantastic flower walk path which gets many Stockholmers out of their winter hibernation to enjoy the spring sun and an icecream in the park.
• 6th of June: Sweden’s National Day, mostly in the Kings Garden with some performances and tents with food and drinks. You could also get a glimpse of the Swedish royals passing by if keeping an eye on their schedule.
• Second Wednesday in June (June 12, 2013): The Archipelago Steamboat Day (actually in the evening only), departures from Strömkajen. Check with Stockholm tourist office to verify date and available tickets out to Waxholm.
• Midsummer Eve Celebration, June 21, 2013: If not invited to a Swedish Midsummer Festive event by friends with family, the best choice would be to go to Skansen, the outdoor museum where public traditional celebration always is held as well.

Of course there are many other dates where special events may be hold too, but these ones above might be the most special or traditional ones.

©Lifecruiser Love Stockholm

 
This post is part of the initiative "100 cities to home swap before you die" from Knok.com.
 

You will notice many scenes from Disney films, that is because it’s an old tradition in Sweden to show Kalle Anka (Donald Duck in Swedish) at 3 o’clock in the afternoon at the Christmas Eve day.

Enjoy the peace and happiness of the holidays, where ever in the world you are. We spend this Christmas in Stockholm, Sweden this year. Next year it will be somewhere else!

©Lifecruiser Love Swedish Christmas
 

Earlier Swedish Christmas posts by Lifecruiser:

Christmas Tree Gifts 2011
Swedish Heart Pepparkakor for Christmas
Santa Travel Speed Need
Merry Christmas 2009
Christmas Dinner Delights 2008
Swedish Christmas Dinner Preparations 2008
Different Christmas 2007
Merry Christmas All Bloggers 2007
Some Swedish Christmas Gifts
Christmas Street Market Stockholm 2007
Wordless Christmas
Swedish Christmas Traditions
Christmas Eve is here (2006)
Christmas Preparations (2006)
Lucia with Glögg & Lussekatter (2006)
Lighten Up Christmas (2005)
 

The Scandic Victoria Tower Hotel is designed by the architect Gert Wingårdh, 117 meter (384 ft) and did cost SEK 600 million (around USD 90 million) to be built. The hotel building is totally covered in glass – I just love this unusual patterned architecture!

My photo above doesn’t quite do it justice. I don’t exactly love it less when also discovering that the inside interior is decorated with design furniture from Vitra, Montana and Flos…

If you happens to be nearby: take the elevator up to the skybar at 34th floor and sit down and sip on a glass of Champagne with a view over Stockholms Silicon Valley.

This is the tallest hotel building in Scandinavia, but the tallest building in Sweden is actually Turning Torso in Malmö which I also adore and wrote about earlier.

©Lifecruiser Love Victoria Tower
 

The building has been nominated to Stockholm Building 2010 for it’s design by the Swedish architect Per Johanson, who played with pastel-colored balcony windows glass as a contrast to the white side of the house which continues over the roof and is supposed to make the house look like it’s upside down U-shaped – at least on a a distance.

What’s so special (read scary!) with this house is the balcony rail of glass from floor to ceiling that hangs like a loose plate outside the balcony itself. I’m afraid of heights myself, so my first thought was how I would dare to go to the front of the balcony rail without getting the feeling of falling down…

When traveling by the subway train passing by the house, you get many reflexes in the colored glass on the house. The more practical side of me thought: how difficult to clean the windows, so much glass everywhere – and how to clean the outside?

I suppose they hire professional windows cleaners to get the job done and not hanging out from there themselves. Phew!

This whole area at Brommaplan is now in the plans of renewing with 600 new apartments as well as 14000 kvm shopping/service areas and it was not a day too early if I should be honest! It’s a bit worn down and not effective used today.

Stockholm is growing and developing – all places need to catch the modern time we are in even though we also need to keep the wonderful old architecture Stockholm has too.

©Lifecruiser Love Stockholm
 

The Turning Torso is, with it’s 190 meters (623 feet) and 54 stories, the tallest building in Sweden when created, but also one of the most spectacular with it’s crazy 90 degrees twisting of the 9 cubes in the tower from top to bottom and irregular pentagonal shaped floors rotating around the vertical core.

A true artwork in structural expressionism by Santiago Calatrava (follow the link to read more about this fantastic engineers work!) from 2005, inspired by his own sculpture called the Turning Torso which the Swedish contractor saw and asked him to copy his design as a building.

Featured in Discovery channel’s TV program, Extreme Engineering – always so incredible fascinating – where they did show how a floor of this twisted tower was constructed. It’s also built with sustainability and an environmentally friendly way of life in mind and the building is supplied only with locally produced and renewable energy.

Santiago Calatrava (from Valencia in Spain) is considered to be one of the worlds elite designers who has won gold medal’s. A truly gifted structural engineer with an unusually artistic approach in his creations! I’m totally blown-away by several of his other architectural wonders too.

He also contributed (but did not won) in the architectural competition for the Swedish Öresund Bridge in the nearby area, which we had to pass over to get from Sweden to Denmark on our next leg of Lifecruiser Europe trip…

©Lifecruiser Love Unusual Architecture
 

It’s definitely all about the moment, to catch so called “Kodak photo moments”. I love those kind of photos. Do you have any to share with us? Please do!

©Lifecruiser Love Cat Photos

Other farm cats photo posts by Lifecruiser:

Travel Photo: Holiday Fat Cat
Farm Photo: Morning Cat
Cat in Box, Gotland
The Farms Wild Cats
Visiting Farm Friends In Norway
 

Yes, the above was we were welcomed with when driving home the last leg of your trip – and have been a big part of the week and today it is even worse than that, it has been pouring down all night and day long.

Only positive thing is that it is easier to adjust to the indoor activities we now need to attend after being away for two whole months! Yes, I’m still trying to sort all the photos from the Europe trip… Have patience with me since they are in a unsorted mess, I tell you…

©Lifecruiser Love European Roadtrips
 

Sorting and uploading all the photos from all those countries will take too long time and I know some of you are very curious of how our very long road trip went, so better to start with this summery with conclusion in the end.

10 Countries were visited by us during this Europe road trip: Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria. We have now been to at least 30 countries together since 2004.

I’ll start with the good things, so if you don’t want to know the bad and the ugly, you can skip the middle part and jump directly to the end of this post and click on the link to see our photos so far.

The Good with the European road trip

Except from the useful travel experience, which always are great to have, and lots of great times here and there, I’ll list the absolute highlights of our European road trip below, not in any particular order.

1. Meeting a lot of friends were one of the main reasons for us to go on this trip from the beginning, a meetup once again in the French Riviera at Claudie and Pierre’s house with the Norwegian blog friends, but also to meetup with several other online friends along the way. Many of them which we never had met before, but that was no problem – very pleasant meetings all of them!

2. To visit the Champagne district and especially Moet Chandon wine cellars & gorgeous vineyards is of course a must when going to France for us Dom Perignon Champagne lovers and it did not let us down as a terrific travel experience.

3. The Netherlands lovely countryside at first and then the west coast with long, gorgeous beaches and actually 2 different blogger friends meetups turning out really good despite quite windy weather conditions.

4. The French Grand Canyon recreation area with it’s marvelous Emerald green lake which we definitely will go back to some day to stay for several days or a week. Also the fantastic French Alp views is really worth exploring more even in the summertime I tell you!

5. The Austrian Alps, gorgeous even in the summertime, but maybe we will even go back there some time in the wintertime even though I normally don’t like the winter. It’s very special with the Alp tops and the people. I did miss any yodeling though… ha ha…

6. The International Sandsculpture festival with incredible sculptures, quite big ones, but actually not as many as we thought there would be, but still worth visiting. Fantastic artists involved from many countries.

7. Certain hotel’s or B&B’s we had booked were surprising us with being even better than we had thought they would be. You never know until you see them in real life!

8. Trying different beer or wines that are not even available in our home country. Every day was a party!

I’ll come back in later travel blog posts, to write more about the different highlights in separate posts and divide the different places into separate photo folders too, making it easier for you to have a look at the special travel experiences.

The Bad with the European road trip

There was too little time and a too small wallet. We spent too much time on the roads, some of the hotels did not match their description or our expectations, some places were not really worth spending time within (like the Rhine Valley in my opinion).

The promised WiFi at too many of the hotels were not working well – if at all, making us unable to keep in contact with people as well as unable to upload photos even from the iPhone many times. That was something we did not like at all and worth thinking of if going on a trip.

The food creation around Europe is in bad shape, it’s really too much french fries to every dish with very little variation, too little vegetables served in the meals, not creative enough if you go to normal restaurants and not the real gourmet or classy ones. I can’t call them budget restaurants since they’ve not really budget prices nowadays.

We had packed two big suitcases which really didn’t fit for the too many steep stairs in the hotels we had booked (or our disk problems), so we had to rearrange a bit, taking out clothes in advance and put in smaller bags to be able to cope during the driving around. It was quite a puzzle sometimes, ha ha!

We had not really great summer weather on this trip, making it very difficult to take photos. It was either unusually cold and gray or way too hot to be outdoors, nothing in between until we did reach Denmark in the end. (We were unusually white this summer actually…)

Both lucky and unlucky: in the end of our trip, when reaching the south of Sweden again, hubby suddenly got ill with dizziness which forced me to do some heavy things I shouldn’t which made my back crack again, which created severe problems when continuing up in Sweden.

We stopped to sleep half ways home in hubby’s childhoods summer home and went home from there the day after that, despite that we had plans to continue our journey within Sweden. It was not meant to be obviously – it has been unsteady weather since.

The Ugly at the European road trip

The highways in Switzerland were the most boring part of our road trip and I think from all our earlier road trips too. I have never seen such a boring motorway ever. I don’t know if it were the fact that we had been on the roads for so long, but the highway never seemed to end…

Our look after being exhausted made me not wanna be on the photos… ha ha… We were looking so darn worn out both of us, like 10 years older suddenly. Our photos and videos, ugly ones I tell you!

Surprisingly enough, we had hard time finding interesting things or beautiful views to capture. We do have lots of interesting photos, but also uninteresting ones and too many deleted ones to be honest. Normally we always find so many things to photograph, but not at all as many as usual on this trip, strange enough.

Conclusion of European roadtrip

If going on such a long road trip, you need at least to double the time (and your wallet!) to get a more satisfying experience. We did know this before we went, but we had no choice, this was what we could manage at this time, so we had to take it or leave it.

We’re satisfied with our experiences as we thought about it as a tour to look around and get a quick view over a lot of countries, to know where we want to go back again in the nearest future. We now know that we want to go back to The Netherlands, The French and the Austrian Alps for sure.

I would not recommend going to the French Riviera in August when it use to be too hot and crowdy and we would never have gone there at this time, if it were not for the fact that our hosts had vacation then and the meetup there with our friends from Norway.

Since all Europe’s holiday period occurs in August, there use to be lots and lots of holiday people out on the roads normally, but we were lucky this year: no severe traffic jams in the directions where we went – only in the opposite directions all the time. Maybe also the economic crises has left some traces, making people staying home more.

Continue to keep an eye on Lifecruiser Europe roadtrip 2012 Flickr Photos, there will be new photos uploaded there now and then until I’m done with them all.

©Lifecruiser Love European Roadtrips

Earlier posts about Lifecruiser Europe Trip 2012:

Ending a long Europe road-trip
Europe roadtrip: in the Alps
Europe trip: leaving the Champagne district to go to Provence
Europe Road short update
Europe Road: leaving Bruges
Europe trip: blogger meet in Wijk aan Zee and IJMuiden, The Netherlands
Europe Road Trip Day 2-3 Goodbye Germany Hello The Netherlands
Europe Road Trip Day 1-2
Europe 7500 km roadtrip start!
 

The thought was to rest and have coffee break after just a couple of hours driving. And how did that go?? Not so well because we couldn’t find any place open at night to buy that coffee… We had to stop and sleep in the morning instead, so yesterday night we were exhausted and only slept at our booked countryside B&B, getting fresh ecological eggs from their hens for breakfast in the morning.

Today when you read this, we’re on the next trip leg: from Rödby, Denmark through Germany to next stop in Westernieland, the Netherlands, which is approx. 500 km.

Those two first days are our longest in the car, mainly transport distances, no regular sightseeing other from very short moments. We have been here before. After this, the sightseeing starts…

Don’t forget to keep an eye on Lifecruiser Europe roadtrip 2012 Flickr Photos too, we will continue to upload our photos as soon as we got the time to do it – and working, fast enough wifi.

©Lifecruiser Love European Roadtrips

Earlier post about Lifecruiser Europe Trip 2012:
Europe 7500 km roadtrip start!
Europe Trip Preparations: Video Camera GoPro Hero 2
Europe Trip Preparations: Double Trip Packing
Europe Trip Preparations: Camera Gears
Europe Trip Preparations: New Notebook PC
Another meetup for the Europe road trip
Europe Trip Preparations: Champagne Coolbox Snacks
New car for the Europe trip
Europe Trip 2012 Summery
Europe Trip Accommodations
Mapped Europe Roadtrip Route 2012 by Lifecruiser
Routes and stays booked for our Europe trip 2012
Planning our Europe trip 2012
 

It’s true! It was our last summer at the island, for private reasons I can’t tell you. It’s a bit sadness involved, but still: we are done with the island now and ready for other summer adventures!

©Lifecruiser Love Islands