Whoops! This one was supposed to go last, but somehow it ended up first. It's of Lucy and me in Stockholm. I'm still working on getting the hang of photoblog layout! The photo below I took for Larry and Deb Broberg. Did they know they have relatives doing a tobacco shop business in downtown Stockholm?? How many of the rest of you House of Hopers have Swedish roots?

We are in Stockholm today. What a gorgeous city this is! Never having been here before I didn't quite know what to expect. It is magnificently laid out on a series of islands and with a meandering waterfront. One of the places we visited today was the museum housing the Vasa, a Swedish warship that sank on it's maiden voyage in Stockholm harbor on Aug. 10, 1628, exactly 371 years ago today. It was raised almost entirely intact from the bottom of the harbor in 1961 and today is housed in a wonderful museum built very creatively around the hull of the ship.We also were at the royal palace at 12:15 p.m. to see the changing of the guard, which included much equestrian pageantry with male and female soldiers dressed in vintage World War I outfits. One of them stomped on my big toe (I was wearing sandals!) as I had my foot right up on the line they had cordoned off for crowd control. A jack boot on bare toenail is not a good feeling, but I don't seem to be much worse for wear, and managed to walk probably 3 to 5 miles around this gorgeous city after that.
The harbor of Stockholm is full of sailing ships of all kinds and sizes. There are cruise boats that come and go as well, and one three master that is moored to one of the islands in the harbor is actually being used as a youth hostel! We saw twenty-somethings pulling their rolling luggage in that direction. Stockholm has a very happening youth-culture scene and very trendy (and expensive !) stores.
The city also has tons of inspiring church architecture, dating from the 1600's on up. We walked around a lot of churches yesterday and today.
This one is for Jan Snell! These are the cloyingly cute little creatures that greeted us on our bed when we checked into our room at the Best Western Hotell Kung Carl on Birger Jarlsgatan in downtown Stockholm yesterday. The notes say that you can't take them home with you when you check out (sorry Jan!) but that you can make a contribution at the check-out desk on their behalf, which will be used for animal and nature conservancy organizations in Sweden. Kind of a catchy idea. (Or did I say "kitschy??")

We're off to Scotland tomorrow, and the weather is supposed to be quite different from the wonderfully balmy mid-summer days we've been enjoying in Sweden. Looks like they're dishing up a week of drizzly gray skies and rainy 50's and 60's in Scotland for the upcoming week. But I've traveled enough to know that you can never take weather forecasts too seriously (at least I want to believe that's so!) More once we get there.