Friday, July 28, 2006
JULY 15th THROUGH JULY 22nd, SWEDEN
The best laid plans of mice and men!! On the first leg of our journey to Sweden we went from Munich to Hamburg. We had reservations and good seats. The train had delays and arrived at Hamburg 39 minutes late. We were told that our connection was being held and we should rush to platform 8 to catch it. When we got to platform 8 they told us we should have gone to platform 6. We rushed there and were told that we had missed the train by two minutes. We were seven and a half hours late getting to Stockholm. We were supposed to take a sleeping compartment at Copenhagen and found that with the new schedule they were all sold out. We ended up getting to Copenhagen at 12; 30 AM and staying in the train station until our train left the next morning at 8:30. Again the station closed from 1:30 until 4:30, a lot of people just went out to their platform and waited it out. We did that and froze our butts off. Interestingly enough it never did really get dark. By the time we got to our destination it really didn’t get dark.
The ticket agent in Hamburg worked real hard and long to help us out. We got the best we could get. This is a real busy travel time all over Europe. A couple of interesting things happened on our train trip from Munich to Hamburg. For one thing, we saw the sweetest little boy and he really liked us.
I think that he knew that we were grandparents who were missing our grand kids. Not really, he was only like eight months old but he came to me and played then let Mary hold him. He was on his way to visit his grandparents.
We saw a Wal-Mart Super Store in a small town in Germany. It’s a shame that Wal-Mart is over here messing with the towns which are 1000 years old and do all their business in the city center. That is so amazing to me; you go into a town and in the center are all the shops on streets which are barely wide enough for two cars to meet. In some places the streets are only wide enough for one car so you have to take turns. I hate to see it happen. McDonalds, Burger King and Pizza Hut have already invaded.
When we left Germany and headed for Denmark the entire train was driven onto a huge ferry boat/ship. We got off and went up to the top deck where there were lounges with glass windows for viewing or there was a lot of room on the outside decks. We crossed the part of the Baltic Sea where it becomes the Gulf of Bothnia. It was a forty five minute boat ride.
We got back on land and went to Copenhagen where we spent the night in the train station. The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. We napped a lot because we had lost a lot of sleep with the connection problems which we experienced.
We knew that our lodgings for the week were remote. We didn’t realize how remote. It was a great place to spend a quite week, but not a good location for tourist who wanted to do a lot of sight seeing. We saw Moose, Reindeer and lot of small animals. In face we watched reindeer cross right behind our house within a hundred yards. There were some interesting little towns in the area and some of the friendly people you would want to meet. Just about everyone spoke English.
We took two days, Tuesday and Wednesday for long range site seeing. We were only about 50 miles from the border with Norway. On Tuesday we went to Norway and drove down to a City called Trondheim. It is on the coast and located on a Fjord that is one of the deepest on the entire coast.
I would like to spend more time on the coast of southern Norway It is rugged and beautiful. Inland there are mountains and a lot of dairy farming in the valleys. They appeared to raise a lot of their own feed, especially wheat, corn and hay. Their houses are unique. Because the generations all live on the farm you see the original home and as the kids grow up and marry the build for them in a big house that looks like an apartment building. This building and the dairy barn form an L shape around the old house.
When we left Norway, instead of returning to Tannas where we were staying, we went to Ostersund where there was a train station. We parked our car there and took a sleeper train to Stockholm. It got in about 3:30 Am, but we did not have to leave the train until 7:00 AM. It swerved just like a motel room. We took a tour of Stockholm which lasted three and a half hours. The first two hours were on a bus and the last hour and a half was on a boat. Stockholm is built on 14 Islands. The city is connected by 47 bridges. The islands have a common thread so if you know what kind of business you are looking for you can find it all on one island. Residences (high rent/low rent) are the same most of the rich in one place and the middle class in another. Museums and art galleries, that kind of thing are grouped. They have a good public transportation system; surprisingly most of it is underground. Their subway stations are decorated by local artists instead of having the walls covered by graffiti.
We saw the new and the old. We visited the seat of government. We went to the old Palace of the Kings. We saw next to the Palace an old Church where the royalty was married and buried. On the boat tour we saw the home of Nobel, and we saw the new city hall where the banquet for the Nobel Prize presentation is held. The hotel where they are housed is right where we boarded the boat for our tour. On the front of the hotel there are flags from a lot of countries flying. They are changed daily so that each day there is a flag for all the countries that are represented by their guests. The boat tour started in the bay which is salt water. There are locks which you pass through to enter Lake Merian which is the third largest lake in Sweden. The water in this lake is so pure and clean that they have swimming beaches and people still fish and eat the fish they catch right in the center of the city.
When our tour was over we boarded another train and returned to our lodging. The next day we prepared to travel and visited with our neighbors. We had a couple from Breckinridge, Colorado staying just down the street from us. They must have been in their seventies and the week before they had been on a bicycle tour in Denmark. They road 30 or 40 miles a day and their luggage was hauled to the hotel they were staying in each night. They have been doing this on their vacations for years and seem to really enjoy it.
On Friday morning we got up and left at 2; 30 AM so we could get to the train and start our trip to Austria.
The best laid plans of mice and men!! On the first leg of our journey to Sweden we went from Munich to Hamburg. We had reservations and good seats. The train had delays and arrived at Hamburg 39 minutes late. We were told that our connection was being held and we should rush to platform 8 to catch it. When we got to platform 8 they told us we should have gone to platform 6. We rushed there and were told that we had missed the train by two minutes. We were seven and a half hours late getting to Stockholm. We were supposed to take a sleeping compartment at Copenhagen and found that with the new schedule they were all sold out. We ended up getting to Copenhagen at 12; 30 AM and staying in the train station until our train left the next morning at 8:30. Again the station closed from 1:30 until 4:30, a lot of people just went out to their platform and waited it out. We did that and froze our butts off. Interestingly enough it never did really get dark. By the time we got to our destination it really didn’t get dark.
The ticket agent in Hamburg worked real hard and long to help us out. We got the best we could get. This is a real busy travel time all over Europe. A couple of interesting things happened on our train trip from Munich to Hamburg. For one thing, we saw the sweetest little boy and he really liked us.
I think that he knew that we were grandparents who were missing our grand kids. Not really, he was only like eight months old but he came to me and played then let Mary hold him. He was on his way to visit his grandparents.
We saw a Wal-Mart Super Store in a small town in Germany. It’s a shame that Wal-Mart is over here messing with the towns which are 1000 years old and do all their business in the city center. That is so amazing to me; you go into a town and in the center are all the shops on streets which are barely wide enough for two cars to meet. In some places the streets are only wide enough for one car so you have to take turns. I hate to see it happen. McDonalds, Burger King and Pizza Hut have already invaded.
When we left Germany and headed for Denmark the entire train was driven onto a huge ferry boat/ship. We got off and went up to the top deck where there were lounges with glass windows for viewing or there was a lot of room on the outside decks. We crossed the part of the Baltic Sea where it becomes the Gulf of Bothnia. It was a forty five minute boat ride.
We got back on land and went to Copenhagen where we spent the night in the train station. The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. We napped a lot because we had lost a lot of sleep with the connection problems which we experienced.
We knew that our lodgings for the week were remote. We didn’t realize how remote. It was a great place to spend a quite week, but not a good location for tourist who wanted to do a lot of sight seeing. We saw Moose, Reindeer and lot of small animals. In face we watched reindeer cross right behind our house within a hundred yards. There were some interesting little towns in the area and some of the friendly people you would want to meet. Just about everyone spoke English.
We took two days, Tuesday and Wednesday for long range site seeing. We were only about 50 miles from the border with Norway. On Tuesday we went to Norway and drove down to a City called Trondheim. It is on the coast and located on a Fjord that is one of the deepest on the entire coast.
I would like to spend more time on the coast of southern Norway It is rugged and beautiful. Inland there are mountains and a lot of dairy farming in the valleys. They appeared to raise a lot of their own feed, especially wheat, corn and hay. Their houses are unique. Because the generations all live on the farm you see the original home and as the kids grow up and marry the build for them in a big house that looks like an apartment building. This building and the dairy barn form an L shape around the old house.When we left Norway, instead of returning to Tannas where we were staying, we went to Ostersund where there was a train station. We parked our car there and took a sleeper train to Stockholm. It got in about 3:30 Am, but we did not have to leave the train until 7:00 AM. It swerved just like a motel room. We took a tour of Stockholm which lasted three and a half hours. The first two hours were on a bus and the last hour and a half was on a boat. Stockholm is built on 14 Islands. The city is connected by 47 bridges. The islands have a common thread so if you know what kind of business you are looking for you can find it all on one island. Residences (high rent/low rent) are the same most of the rich in one place and the middle class in another. Museums and art galleries, that kind of thing are grouped. They have a good public transportation system; surprisingly most of it is underground. Their subway stations are decorated by local artists instead of having the walls covered by graffiti.
We saw the new and the old. We visited the seat of government. We went to the old Palace of the Kings. We saw next to the Palace an old Church where the royalty was married and buried. On the boat tour we saw the home of Nobel, and we saw the new city hall where the banquet for the Nobel Prize presentation is held. The hotel where they are housed is right where we boarded the boat for our tour. On the front of the hotel there are flags from a lot of countries flying. They are changed daily so that each day there is a flag for all the countries that are represented by their guests. The boat tour started in the bay which is salt water. There are locks which you pass through to enter Lake Merian which is the third largest lake in Sweden. The water in this lake is so pure and clean that they have swimming beaches and people still fish and eat the fish they catch right in the center of the city.
When our tour was over we boarded another train and returned to our lodging. The next day we prepared to travel and visited with our neighbors. We had a couple from Breckinridge, Colorado staying just down the street from us. They must have been in their seventies and the week before they had been on a bicycle tour in Denmark. They road 30 or 40 miles a day and their luggage was hauled to the hotel they were staying in each night. They have been doing this on their vacations for years and seem to really enjoy it.
On Friday morning we got up and left at 2; 30 AM so we could get to the train and start our trip to Austria.
