Sweden Day 6

Today will be the story of two different days separated by a lunch. I had to get up early because I was heading to Visby. This involved a 35 minute flight on a Fokker 50 twin turbo prop airplane. I believe the 50 because it carries 50 passengers. I have never been on a non jet nor a plane this small before so there was a tad bit of nerves on Wednesday night but I said what the hell in the end… I got up at say 6am and was showered and out the door quickly. I was able to get to central station and purchase a round trip ticket to Bromma airport (which is the other much smaller airport in Stockholm, Arlanda is the real international one). I missed the 6:50 but there was one at 7:10. My flight was at 7:55 and since not an international or anything I only needed to be there about a half an hour early. The bus takes about 20 minutes and the driver hit that almost spot on. When we got into the terminal I found that I needed to get to the gotlandsflyg check in and then go through security. I forgot to take off my watch and the man at the metal detector gave me the full pat down before letting me through. Note to self to put watch in bag before every flight… In any event by the time I was through security I stood there for less than 2 minutes before they were boarding the plane. It worked out pretty smoothly to keep me getting edgy about it. The plane was fairly small. High winged with the landing gear set in the engine location on the wings. I ended up towards the back due to my entry position as there was no assigned seating. I was pretty much right behind the wing and could stare at the landing gear. They actually close up much faster than I thought they would. The actually flight to Gotland was uneventful and much lower altitude than any other flight I’ve been on. Until we got past most of the archipelago I could see very well then we flew into clouds. It did give me perspective on how many islands there really are out there even if most all of them are not inhabited and have no structures on them. It looked very cool though. We didn’t fly out of the clouds until landing but that was easy and we were getting off the plane in no time (by the way, no gate or anything, just the door/stairs and the tarmac until you walk into the building).

I pushed right out of the airport and got the first taxi at the stand. The ride to the center of Visby was about 5 minutes or so. It was slightly chilly but not cold and there was a bit of overcast but nothing like rain. The ground even looked dry which is different from Stockholm. Pretty much right out of the taxi I could see the walls of the city and since it was about 9am and I was going to skip breakfast and go straight to lunch I immediately started the outer ring of the wall. The cab driver said it is 4km around but I walked it slowly taking a lot of pictures so that I didn’t miss anything and because this is the kind of stuff that I really like. The walls themselves were built in many stages as were all of the various towers and other structures in the wall but most of the town was built between the 1200s and 1300s then modified a few times both before and after the invention of gunpowder. Gotland did not become a part of Sweden until 1648 or so and the inhabitants that did most of the building were Germanic rather than Swedes. Gotland became a very important part of the long distance trade routes established by the Vikings due to its very advantageous location in the Baltic. They had placards along the route outside of the building that had English as well as German and Swedish and I read all of them and took pictures of most of them though a couple had some graffiti on them that rather obscured the text for photos so I skipped them. It probably took me about an hour and a half to two hours to get around the entire outer wall. I then took a sweep up the new town center (outside the wall) and decided it was still too early to eat so opted to dive back into the walls of the city to see what I could find. Inside the wall there were all sorts of narrow cobblestone streets, many that did allow automobile traffic. The housing seemed to be mostly residential with some shops and restaurants thrown in along the way. I assume that Visby is mainly a summer home type place and most all of the housing inside the wall appeared to be vacated for the off season though by about 11am many of the shops and restaurants opened up it appeared. I found the ruins of at least 3 really old churches in there as well. They apparently have a history of churches and the island is known as the Island of 100 Churches because there were that many on it. The majority of them were also built in the 1200s to 1300s and many were torn down and rebuilt a couple times until the middle of the 1300s when the construction just sort of stopped and the churches were all left as is from there. There was also the Domkyrk S:tMaria (that’s how it was spelled). Which was a 17th century church that had eventually been added to a few times and was fairly neat and open to the public. Aside from the churches there was a botanical garden that was started by a local swimming club in the 1800s. The club bought the land and made a garden out of it and used it to teach gardening and nature to the youth of the area. I was surprised to find flowers still alive in there amongst the various trees and other plants they had collected as well several medieval ruin sites. The garden was nice and I suspect it looks very beautiful in spring and summer when most everything is in bloom. After fumbling my way through many of the up and down streets and then eventually through the garden and then back up and down a bit more I found my way back to the north gate and decided that now that it was near noon I should eat lunch. I chose Ali’s which was very near the gate and was an apparently typical lunch place that Sweden has. I ordered a small Bolognese pizza (which is with meatballs but they didn’t crumble meatballs so much as just serve a meat sauce on the pizza) and that came with a salad and bread bar (again communal bread). The food was good and the meat sauce was sorts spicy so I liked it. There was a hint of caraway in the salad dressing but it didn’t bother me too much. It might have been from the sauerkraut but I think it was the dressing itself because I didn’t notice it if I just ate the kraut.

I left the lunch place sort of hurriedly because it appeared that more guests were coming in and there was a limitation of seats and rather than hog up a four person table to myself while others couldn’t sit I figured I could move on. Almost immediately as I got outside it began to rain. It started lighter but it built in strength along the day. Unlike the rain in Kungälv which was mostly misty and not too offensive this eventually became full on drops of driving rain, though fortunately never of the downpour caliber. I wasn’t daunted at first and went back into the walled city where I eventually visited the church to break up the rain a bit. Someone was tuning the pipe organ and at times it sounded really nice and at times I was surprised that a pipe organ could make such noises. In any event I only really spent a few minutes there before I headed back out and sort of made my way through a few of the shops. There weren’t many souvenir shops open even if the majority of the others were. I suspect there isn’t much call for souvenir sales after the main season is well over. Nonetheless I did find a couple that were open and visited them aside from some candy shops and the like. Doing all of this killed another couple of hours but I was not scheduled to fly back until 7:30pm. I am not sure now if this was a good or a bad thing. In planning something like this you really have no idea how long you might want to stay. If taking a train you can usually reschedule, especially if you have a pass, but with the flight it was pretty much no choice. I am certain had the weather held like it was in the morning I would have enjoyed staying out there for the entire day. After some walking and eventually getting thoroughly soaked I decided to stop in a place to get a coffee and sit down for a bit. I warmed up somewhat and the coffee was ok for Sweden but I couldn’t stay seated there forever either, so I eventually set outside again. Unfortunately I must have chosen the poorest moment because the wind was very strong and the rain was very biting. After walking past the cab stand and going into the north gate I decided to turn around and get a cab to the airport to stay in the warmth and dry.

Visby’s airport is smaller than Bromma and felt like it might be about the size of the Greater Lawrence Airport even. In any event there was one small café and a few places to sit and no gift shop or anything. I settled in for the long haul of a couple hours of waiting. I was disconcerted to see flights before mine from gotlandsflyg have some sort of issues or something but since there were no announcements and anything and everything was in Swedish I really have no idea what happened or was happening. The big board of departures got stuck at the 5pm flights and never advanced though it was obvious that a couple of those flights got out. It all seemed very scattered, confused and disorganized. Forever and a few minutes later it was the expected boarding time for my flight but they weren’t ready. That didn’t start until about 20 minutes after they were supposed to. The attendant told me that the plane was delayed and may be there by 8 instead of 7:30pm. Ok, I said. This time I did pack my watch and didn’t get a pat down. We waited in the gate for quite a while so that the plane was not ready for boarding until 50 minutes late. Everyone piled on board and I think we got out to taxi in mere minutes. The nice thing about being the last plane of the night was that they pretty much went straight from taxi to take off without transition.

This was the horror flight I had expected in the morning. No, it wasn’t really terror or anything but there was a fair amount of turbulence that pushed the plane about for most of the flight so that we may only have gotten a one or two minute stretch that was ok. The landing part was near terror. The winds over Stockholm must have been fierce and we were buffeted in every direction all the way down. I was amazed at how smoothly the plane landed as we went from being pushed left and right straight into the rumble of the air strip with almost no transition. I figured there was a good chance we’d make local news for a plane off the runway or something but the pilot must have been damn good at landing in the kind of weather we hit. If I had a hat with me my hat would have been off to him. In any event since I was so hideously late now the next bus that I had prepaid for would not arrive until around 10pm and it was just barely past 9pm. On top of that, even though it had stopped raining in Visby before we took off it was still very much so raining in Stockholm. With Bromma being as small as Visby’s airport and also very much closed inside I decided to take a cab thus wasting the prepayment of the bus fare I will never use. Anyway, that saved me well over an hour so I will deal with it. I had the cab driver drop me off at central station because it was easier than trying to explain where the hotel was and then I chose to quickly scarf down my missed dinner from the McDonald’s right there then run up to the room. I got here just before 10pm.

As I said the part of the day before lunch was awesome then it spun out of control as it went along. I am happy took the chance on this part of the trip but it would have been nice for the weather to cooperate on it so that the whole day was as fun as the beginning…

I should mention, if I ever became obnxiously rich in some fashion I would definitely consider buying a summer home in Visby.

The images from Day 6 are located here.