The church next to the train station in Gävle.
Day 6 • Thursday
Today we catch the train to Stockholm which is scheduled to leave at 9:00 am. I had a small breakfast at the house while Lena got ready, then we drove to mom’s to pick her up, then drove to the train station. There Lena and her mom had coffee and some pastries at the local bakery across the street from the train station. They have very yummy fresh baked goodies there, so of course I had some too!
The train ride took about 1-1/2 hours to get to Stockholm’s central station and was smooth and quite.
Breakfast at the bakery across from the train station in Gävle.
Once we arrived at the central station, we stored our luggage in a locker since check in at the hotel wasn’t until 2:00 pm. This trip was not for us to do any site seeing, but for Lena and her mom to spend some time shopping for things she can not find in Gävle. Mom use to live in Stockholm and misses the big city, and because of her age, she does not go to the city by herself.
The weather was partly cloudy and a bit cold in Stockholm when we arrived, but the sun was warm. We walked around a bit going in and out of various shops. One store we walked into looked like an average sized shoe store, but when we walked in, there was an escalator which went down into a very large room full of shoes and boots of all kinds. Lena was in shoe heaven, but she resisted and walked out without buying a thing! It was getting close to lunch time, so we found a small stand and had tunnbrödsrulle.
The bakery across from the train station in Gävle.
This is a hotdog with mashed potatoes wrapped in a soft Swedish tortilla. Of course you can add all kinds of condiments to this such as shrimp salad, relish, ketchup, mustard, fried onions or any thing else you can think of. I like mine with ketchup and mustard, but Lena gets hers with shrimp salad. After lunch, and a bit more walking around, it was time to head to our hotel. We first went back to central station and retrieved our luggage from the locker, then took the subway to Odenplan. Here we took the #2 bus for two stops and got off, then walked about 10 minutes to the hotel. If we had researched this a little better, we would have taken a different bus, #65, the one which stops in front of our hotel. The hotel is located in the north part of Stockholm called Norrmalm. The outside of the hotel isn’t much, but inside is very nice. For more on the Elite Palace Hotel, see my review.
After getting settled in our rooms, one for Lena and me, and one for mom, we all went back out for some more walking and shopping.
The bakery across from the train station in Gävle.
We made a stop at the Harley-Davidson dealer and checked out the store. Working for a Harley dealer, it’s always interesting to visit other shops to see how things are done and set up. I also had a shirt I purchased from my store in Annapolis which I exchanged for a shirt from the Stockholm store. This is not something that is usually done, and I wasn’t sure if they would do it, so I was going to give them the shirt anyway and was prepared to buy a shirt from them. But, they gave me a shirt in exchange for the one I gave them.
Once we all got tired from walking, we decided to head back to the hotel and call it a day. Mom is not much on eating out, so she picked up something to snake on in her room. Lena and I decided to just walk up the street and get a pizza and bring it back to our room. We also stopped at the bar in our hotel (the Bishops Arm Pub) and got a couple of beers for me and took them up to our room to have with the pizza. The pizza was yummy, and the beers strong, and after some Tv watching, it was time to call it a night.
