Sweden

As we were out and about doing our chores to get ready for dance camp, we happened to walk right by a fabric shop.  And inside we found this little beauty!

Swedish Fabric

So not much of a story to this one…but we love, love, love the design!

We were sad that the dance camp was over, but not for long because the next leg of our trip was one that we were really looking forward to!  One of my close friends from high school is living in Helsinki, Finland with her boyfriend and we got to go and see her!!!  But this post isn’t about that yet because we had several bus rides, a subway ride, and an overnight ferry to take in order to get there.  We left Herrang in the morning after the camp was over and arrived in Helsinki about 24 hours later.

Excited to go and see my friend!!!

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Herräng Sign

Each summer, the tiny town of Herräng becomes the swing dancing capital of the world. Hazel and I had both wanted to attend the camp for several years before but actually getting to Sweden for weeks on end in the summer was always too difficult. This year, we made sure to go by setting up our Europe itinerary such that we’d end up there at the right time! (more…)

After lounging around in the Copenhagen first class lounge it was finally time to go to Sweden. The train ride was uneventful, but we could notice a change already – there was no free chocolate on the Swedish trains! I suppose this was offset, though, by the free internet access provided to first class customers.

We arrived in Stockholm and tried to find our hostel, called Interhostel. A few things got in our way, though; first thing was that we weren’t able to find the street we needed when we left the station! It turned out that we got off at the wrong level of the station. This taught us our first lesson about Stockholm: the bridges are very important! Eventually we found our way to the side of the station and looked down on a cross street 100 feet below, which turned out to be the one we wanted. Anyway, we took this road for a while (in fact until it changed names) but the next turn was nowhere to be found! We were beginning to get a little weary at this point, but we pressed on along the new road and found our turn after two more blocks. We were relieved at this point because the hostel was less than a block away.

Interhostel was a pretty nice place. The beds were comfortable and spacious, the hostel was cheap, and our room was nearly empty the whole time we were there. Of course in Scandinavia the norm is to charge travelers for bed linens (we used our sleep sacks), which was a little unusual to us, but on the whole we approved.

Our Bunk At Interhostel

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