Day 10 - 21 August - Stockholm - day 6 of the cruise

Woke up this morning to see that the ship is sailing incredibly close to some small islands.  I had recently found out that Stockholm is approached by sailing through islands, and is in fact basically situated on islands (14 of them it turns out).  However, I had no idea that they're actually situated in an archipelago of about 24000 islands.  I was going to post a photo or two here but it turns out that the ones I took of these islands are all on my phone; I'll add them later.

We didn't get to watch the ship dock because we had to be downstairs ready to go on our shore excursion.  It was your basic shore excursion - 44 people on a bus, looking where we're told and going where we're told.  However, if you don't know anything about a place it's a good enough way to learn about it, as long as the places you're seeing aren't too crowded and you don't mind that it takes a long time to get anywhere.   Our guide (Lars) did a good job - shared a lot of information in an interesting way.

The main part of the tour was to see the Vasa.  This is a 17th century warship, built by the king of the day - Sweden was quite warlike at that time - to show off to the king of Poland how huge a warship they could build.  Unfortunately due to a design flaw - probably brought on by the king adding an extra gundeck after construction started, although that wasn't ever admitted to be the cause - it sailed for approximately 20 minutes before it sank.  And, it stayed there for 333 years until they raised it in the 1960s.   

Carvings on the Vasa - this sort of work appears in many places on the ship - astoundingly detailed carved decorations which were apparently originally painted.

This gives you an idea of the size of the ship.

Paul, beside a cannon, because you can never have too many pictures of Paul beside a cannon!

Sadly it turns out that it probably wasn't a good idea to raise it and some of the treatment they gave it at the time has not helped - apparently unless they find a way to stop it, the ship will simply decay away over the next 50 - 100 years.

Good thing about Stockholm - the prepaid SIM for both my phone and iPad allow free data roaming here, so I could post photos straight to Facebook.  Berlin wasn't like that though, and athough Bruge promised to be, it never actually worked.  No idea about the rest of the cities on the cruise but hopefully some of them will be on the 'free roaming' list as it will cut down my ship's internet bill by quite a bit!

We got back to the Eclipse around lunch time and considered going out for a walk after lunch  - it's quite simple to walk to the Old Town from the docks.  However we went to sleep instead and only woke up when the ship was pulling away from the docks.  Something about being on a cruise ship in the afternoon just makes us drift off to sleep!

Dinner was nice, but it was formal night - quite unusual to have formal night on a day when we've been in port, but there are so few sea days on this ship I guess there wasn't a choice.  I'm not really all that keen on formal night but we opted for fixed seating dining on this cruise so there's really not a lot of choice if we don't want our table-mates to think we've abandoned them, since we're likely to do so over the next few days anyway (because of exhaustion following shore excursions!).