It seems like our Stockholm Archipelago trip has been quite short. And I knew it was going to be only five days instead of the seven we had in Croatia. But I did not fully appreciate that we would spend two of them in Stockholm. So, we are coming to the end of this trip feeling like I wanted to see more and to do more. I wish it had been a longer trip. I wish I could have done more riding. I wish I had seen more islands. And I wish I had had a better bike. Still, I do not feel like I was cheated. I saw what they promised and the accommodations were actually better than I expected.
We had a choice today to leave on the early boat or on the later one. The earlier boat went to another island. However, it was not possible to ride on that island, only to hike. None of our group decided to do that, even Steve. Australian John definitely had no interest in doing that, as he told me over breakfast.
But I am hardly going to find fault with that guy as I learned today that he is 85 years old! I am really impressed by a man that age not only traveling the world by himself but doing some of it on a mountain bike. He is an inspiration to me. I want to be still traveling, still active in twenty five years.
John and I decided to see the north part of Utö. This appeared to be a rather short, easy ride on the map. And it really was. It was also extraordinarily beautiful. We were not far out of the little vacation village of Grubvyn when we came across a pasture with some sheep. John and Stephen had talked about this over breakfast. They mentioned how a number of sheep were black. Stephen said that in the United Kingdom now children are taught to chant "Bah, bah, green sheep, have you any wool?" because the people at OFSTED, the national education agency, thought that the real words might be racist. Of course, there are no green sheep, and the wool from black lambs was prized as it did not need to be dyed. But what do biology and history matter when political correctness is at stake?
We came across some of the most achingly lovely scenery I have looked at in years. The pictures really do not do it justice.
And as I looked at it I had a strange insight into myself. I spend much of my waking moments feeling somewhere between vaguely irritated to seriously angry. I sometimes wonder if on my grave I should copy the epitaph of Jonathan Swift: "Hic depositum est corpus Ionathan Swift . . . Ubi sæva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit." "Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift . . . where savage indignation can rend his heart no more." Yet here I was feeling extraordinarily peaceful. And it occurred to me that my feelings are a response to my situation, and that I can control that situation to some degree. I can leave my job with the school district. I can stop reading the newspaper constantly. I can detach from all the nonsense related to Church. Now I probably will not do any of those things, but it was strangely helpful to understanding that my feelings are not who I am. To put it in Thomistic terms, and I always like to put things when I can in the words of Saint Thomas, they relate to existence rather than essence. Anger is a potentiality, but so is peacefulness. I am not sure what I will do with this insight, but it helped me.
We came back to the village after riding about for a couple hours. We stopped by the the Utö museum. It was not much. In fact, it mostly seemed like a handicraft store with a few old pictures and some iron mining equipment on display. Still, we did find a couple interesting things like the general store mannequin
or this vintage travel poster.
We had a lovely lunch at the restaurant by the hotel. John book a picture of a painting somebody had mad of the hotel. It captures the feel of the place better than a photograph does.
It was a stunningly perfect day, clear, sunny, and about seventy degrees with a gentle breeze. We a lovely, leisurely lunch. We watched as people came walked and cycled by. Pedal-powered carts are a popular family choice.
About fifteen minutes before the boat was scheduled to leave we went down to the village. I turned in my bike and took the Nordic Tracks one back. With its completely flat tire I rolled it over to the dock. We knew that we all had no time to waste when the ship came into port. Everybody rushed on board with their luggage first and only later returned to put their bikes on board. We have our priorities!
It was a beautiful ride back, but not a quick one.
Like me, Stephen stood on the stern and book pictures.
That, by the way, is the most restrained of his cycling shirts! I also spent time trying to evade this crazy Swedish man who insisted on trying to talk to all of us. He went on and on to me in broken English about the “hippies.” I am not sure if he liked them or not. But he certainly liked to photobomb my picture of my friends from Manchester.
To get from the archipelago into Stockholm harbor requires navigating through some narrow channels.
I have no idea how cruise ships do it; perhaps there is some special channel that has been created for shipping. These are obviously some of the nicest areas of Stockholm. I suspect that while some of the houses were summer places originally, most now are suburban homes.
One of the things I have noticed in Sweden is that it is not the socialist society that most Americans think it is, whether they like that idea or not. There are definite social classes. Some people are wealthy and many other people are not. You see people begging on the streets. While there are many more immigrants than I expected to see here, they are the people who are driving cabs or bussing tables in restaurants. When we talked to some of those people, and the cab drivers were often somewhat chatty, they talked about how hard it is to make it in Sweden and how so many of them are forced to share a single flat. Sweden has high taxes, but it is a capitalist society. And I think that immigrants want to come there less for the social welfare benefits and more for the hope that they too, or more likely their children, may make it some day into that comfortable upper middle class that they see around them each day.
Carmen met us on the dock. And here we had a bit of a surprise. Australian John was met on the dock by a woman who looked to be about twenty years his junior. We all sensed that there was a relationship here. We asked Stephen, who roomed with John and knew the most about him, whether that was his "small f" or "capital F" friend. "Oh, the latter," he slyly informed us. Aussie John does indeed have a lot of life in him at eighty five!
Carmen took us in the ran to the Rex Hotel. It is also part of the Hellsten hotel chain that rain the Queen Christina hunting lodge. Once again, rooms were clean but small and pretty basic. And here my serenity evaporated and "savage indignation" returned when I called AT&T to discuss how they had messed up my international plan. I had to deal with a twit named Kevin who made it abundantly clear that while they had indeed given me the wrong plan he was not about to try to fix anything except the blame on me. I absolutely exploded. John was so upset that he went off by himself for a walk for an hour while I calmed down.
I am sure tomorrow will be better. And I'll deal with AT&T, probably by switching to Verizon and Spectrum, awful as they are too, when I return next week.
