It’s almost always worth getting out of the centre of a big city – it’s where the people live, it’s where real life rather than tourist life happens.
I went out to the Stockholm suburbs because that’s where I was staying. We did spend most of our time in central Stockholm – Esther likes playing tour guide, I like being a tourist but I also took local advice and went to places that would normally get missed out.
Nynäshamn
Nynäshamn is at the southern end of the pendeltåg (the commuter train) – well, one southern end. The 42, 43 & 45 all go to Nynäshamn. John recommended it to me as a pleasant seaside town, which it is. But in winter, it’s an absolute winter wonderland.
It’s a ferry port. You can take the ferry to Gotland or even to Latvia and Poland, apparently. And it’s a marina. It’s got a little harbour formed between the town and the little island opposite, which is just full of small boats and tourist boats (which don’t run when the sea is iced up). What I found really pretty was indeed that the sea was iced up. I don’t think it was thick enough to walk on and I imagine most of the boats were big enough and tough enough to break through the ice.
However, when I’d walked along the seafront, I reached a kind of pond in a kind of park. I say kind of because when everything was frozen and ice-covered, it’s hard to tell exactly what everything is. The map suggests it’s a kind of small lake or more likely lagoon. What I know is that it was frozen solid – so solid that not only could you skate on it, you could play ice hockey on it. It was covered quite deeply in snow but the snow had been removed somehow in a big loop around the lagoon to make a skating track and since it was quiet there, a group of kids were using part of it to play hockey. I struggled a little bit across the grass to a bench and sat and watched.
Nynäshamn seems to be a place where people walk their dogs. I followed a Jack Russell along the seafront and back round to the station and its owner decided to have a little chat. I caught a couple of words in Swedish, immediately went to ask him to try another language and my brain panicked and I asked half in Norwegian and half in English. Norwegian & Swedish aren’t interchangeable but I could read a reasonable amount, even with my toddler level of Norwegian language. I’m not sure what he thought of me but he decided to continue the conversation in English.
Handen
Handen is on the same branch of the pendeltåg as Nynäshamn. The town itself is a small-medium commuter town but what it has is two lakes right next to the railway line and of course, they were frozen solid. We trekked through the woods and then across the lake, through the woods and eventually found a good fire pit.
“Now… have you ever walked on a frozen lake before?” Esther asked as we approached.
“Umm… actually, yes, I have.”
“Oh! I forgot you go to cold places!”
So, no, walking on the frozen lake wasn’t a new experience for me. But last time I went, I was with a professional snowshoe guide deep in the Arctic Circle. That’s a bit different to going out with friends who are there for their first winter at much the same latitude as Shetland. No, I wasn’t worried about the ice breaking, not really. The other lake has one of these skating loops cut into it. But there were cracks in the surface and John was adamant that he could hear the ice “booming” as it expanded or contracted or something. The rest of us couldn’t hear it.
We were out to have a campfire in the woods. Sweden encourages this by providing fireplaces, benches and bins. It’s the shame of my Guide leader life that I can’t start a fire. John can start a fire but we didn’t have much wood and some of the wood was pretty damp. So he lit it and it produced a lot of filthy brown smoke and the kids were disappointed that it looked likely we couldn’t cook sausages and marshmallows after all.
So John disappeared into the woods to get some better wood and I turned my attention to the fire. I may not be able to start one but I can maintain one. There were bits of half-burnt wood from the last user so I gathered them and the bits we had and built them up into a little pyramid and poked small stuff into the holes and by the time John returned, I’d made a good little fire, worthy of cooking sausages.
So we cooked sausages on sticks. The sausages weren’t much wider than the stick and when they were applied to the heat, they tended to split open and then, unless you caught them in time, fall off the stick. But we did manage to cook them and the kids were pleased to find we’d brought ketchup. The marshmallows went even better because they stayed on the sticks and the fire had died down a little by then and we could cook them over the really hot white ashes.
By then, it was time for me to be heading back to the airport. Luckily, we could walk through the woods and cross over to the station rather than walk back across the lake and through the other woods and down the main road – I’d been mentally adjusting what time I’d need to leave all the way to the fireplace, only to find there was a shortcut.
As it turned out, my plane was delayed by an hour and a half and I really didn’t need to hurry.