Wednesday, 3 October, 2018 – Weather – who cares we are leaving town
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We are up early this morning as we have to go to the docks to catch our Ferry across the Fjord to Turku, the original Capitol of Finland. The guys have ordered take away breakfast boxes while I nibbled on the leftover BBQ ribs from our fridge.
Yesterday, I had the Hotel order a large taxi to take all of our baggage and us. Sure enough a small taxi showed up. We had no choice but to take two taxis to the docks.
I had also communicated with the Cruise line, Viking, about timings. They said the gate would open at 6:15 and they wanted everyone off the street to be inside by 6:45.
We are processed fairly quickly and, via a ticket machine, assigned our rooms and get room ticket cards. We are sent to another staging area, it is 6:20 and we are told that we cannot board the ship until 7:20, another hour sitting around. Lots of other people are also shunted into this area. Initially they were all female couples. It is amazing how many same sex couples we saw throughout Scandinavia. Eventually, some hetero couples arrived.
When we are finally let in, we go to our room which is an inner berth. If I thought the room in Stockholm was small, well this really took the cake.
I have a brief nap and then go up a floor to where the guys are hanging out.
We are cruising through the Stockholm Archipelago of 30,000 islands, skerries and rocks fans out 80 km east into the Baltic Sea from the city. It rather overwhelms the “thousand islands” around the Philippines.
We went up to restaurant on the 10th floor. It had lots of cold stuff but also some hot foods.
All up the cruise took about 11 hours. We go down to the exit point and it is closed until the station master carefully and slowly guides the landing plank into place. When opened there is a mad rush to get off the boat and into taxis, with the departing staff given a major head start. We get out to the taxi queue and there was one full sized taxi near the end of the queue. We convince him to take us with a little persuasion.
Ryan guides the driver as we have to go to one location to pick up a key and then to another where we ware staying. When we get there we see that it is a huge old Hotel, circa 1880s that has been converted into apartments.
We try various entrances and none of them leads to our apartment. Finally, Julie spots the right entrance and Ryan verifies that it is the correct place. I noticed our entrance is right next to a Strip Club.
Inside the apartment, it is massive.
Note the various degrees of pornography on the wall. It would seem that our landlord is a proud bi-sexual.
The beds were comfortable enough but very low making it difficult to get up from them. Note also there are plants everywhere in the apartment. He is obviously trying to be carbon neutral.
It was after 10:00 PM and most of us were hungry. The guys went out and came back relatively quickly with:
Boy did that hit the spot. I could not finish it all. Julie had a salad which was added to from my box. Tanika had some kind of chicken schnitzel which she heated up in the microwave.
After a long day and a long distance, it really was time for bed.