Cruise Day 8 Nynäshamn

Ah, lovely Nynashamn - somewhere I've always wanted to go. Not! Not that I've anything against it, indeed prior to this trip I'd never heard of it. And I'd bet that you haven't either. When our ship discovered that predicted weather conditions could mean becoming stuck in Stockholm, we were diverted to the more Southerly port of Nynashamm. This required a complete revision of our plans for Stockholm with much doubt about how helpful the ship would be with it. First of all there would be extra time required to reach the city and secondly would be more expense. This did vindicate our decision months ago to book our visit to the ABBA museum for 12pm - so that it would be more "robust" in case of cruise variations. We made a new plan and decided that it hinged on being on the first available tender boat (the changed port having no berth for the ship) then the first available train to Stockholm. A cunning plan that was nearly foiled by the ship proving once again to have a careless approach to organising and to those of us not using cruise-arranged tours. Hence we sat in a tender next to the ship for over 20 minutes and missed our train. A train that the ship had itself informed us about (and confirmed by us using some purchased internet research time). Not happy Jan! Dropped on the dock we did the non-trivial walk into Nynashamm to catch a later train. This then took an hour to reach Stockholm and thus we were eventually able to start our visit there. First, we quickly checked with the tourist info desk at the station that our city travel plan should work. Next step was a "metro" train ride by one station to be on the island of Gamla Stan, which is the most historic part of the city. Here we went into the Royal burial church, which while clearly a real church is almost entirely devoted to being the burial place of the royal dynasties. To this end it has had multiple sideways extensions of chapels above ground and crypts below ground to house royal coffins. We saw all of these by wandering around and up and down. For a church that has been burnt and rebuilt quite a bit the amount of history inside was staggering. A feature that I'd not seen before was the large number of heralded burial plates - these signify noble people not entombed there. These and the actual tombs date back centuries. From there we wandered between buildings of various ages to reach the royal complex. Here we only had time to see the Royal apartments, which I think elsewhere would just be called the palace. While there was art throughout, the feature here was the rooms, their decorations and fittings. In room after room the impact was a confirmation of a fact that has shown up in the history on show in the earlier cities, museums and palaces. Namely that Sweden had long been the dominant power in the Baltic. The degree of majesty built into the royal apartments states this over and over again. I can now see why Peter the Great of Russia had monuments made to crow about conquering the region of St Petersburg - clearly beating Sweden was notable. These also seemed to be apartments that were thoroughly used by sequences of monarchs who had left their stamps upon it. And some rooms were quite specialised - eg ones for the appointing of Swedish orders of the garters. For lack of time we missed the other royal places: the Treasury, Tre Kronor museum, museum of antiquities - which we had effectively paid for. From there we headed down to the water for a ferry to the island of Djurgarden. We were just in time for our booking at the ABBA museum. After that we walked across to the Vasa museum. You could be forgiven for thinking that this is now Stockholm's #1 attraction - so many guides mention it. It certainly is unique. Inside a custom built museum is the salvaged ship, the Vasa, which sank in 1628. As a thing to visit, the museum wraps itself around the ship giving a very full story of its circumstance, its fate, its salvage and its restoration. In short, it is as good as described. Alas for lack of time we had to bypass the nearby Nordic museum and catch the Tram #7 back to the modern city centre. We had a surprise tram halt, as the track simply ended before any of our maps said it would. There are clearly works in progress, perhaps related to the bus station which adjoins the train station. While our tram trip was very short we did get inspected while on it. Absurdly we now had a pocket of time to spare so we walked through streets to the waterside then back up through tourist trinket central. Then it was into the station to grab a snack and then back on the train to the port town. One aspect of this major train journey was that it made it expedient to buy a full day travel card, which we then used for our transports within the city. In our original plan this didn't seem worthwhile - the advantage of having it is that saved time mucking about with individual fares and let us directly board vehicles. Back well in time for the last tender boat we once again sat in the boat while we waited - this time for stragglers. After thus gathering in a couple of latecomers, we had already cast off and pulled away when a party of three ran onto the dock. Alas we were turned back to pick them up. ;-p So, the ship's ineptitude meant that we missed two or three major sights and/or lunch. Missing lunch due to entirely avoidable ship delays seems to be the theme of this cruise. Don't think I'll be cruising with Princess again. Their motto may be Escape Completely and they bang on a lot about relaxing on cruise but this is the one that has had the most ambiguities and least usable information giving us unwanted stress.