Stockholm; Monday, 06 June, 2022

When the trip was originally booked the return flight was at 8pm which gave us ample time to explore the city, but a couple of months before we were due to travel BA cancelled the late flights from Stockholm and instead put us on a flight 3:40 in the afternoon, so we now only had a little bit of time in the morning before we needed to be back at the hotel for 1pm to meet our taxi back to the airport.

With only a small amount of time we decided to go on a self-guided cruise round the archipelago using the public transport ferries.

From the hotel we walked the short distance to the metro station and caught the line one stop back to where we interchanged onto the other branch of the metro up to the end of the line at Ropsten.

We arrived at the metro station about a minute or so after the previous ferry had left, which was good as it meant we weren’t rushing to make the connection down to the temporary ferry quay about a five minute walk away.

From Ropsten the ferry runs back into the centre of Stockholm, stopping at several piers along the way on different islands, as well as the mainland, and offering excellent views of the city.

The ferry ended at Nybroplan where we were able to walk the short distance to the nearby metro station, stopping to watch the Swedish mounted army band ride pass on their way to Nation Day celebrations.

We hopped on a metro the one stop back to near the hotel, grabbed our stuff and waited outside in the sun for our taxi to the airport.

Once checked in we headed to assisted travel who were very busy and only to happy to let me take responsibility for mums wheelchair, which gave us access to the fast track queue for security – which was a blessing as the queue for regular security was enormous with a long queue just to enter a holding pen where people were queuing before being allowed to join the main queue!

Needless to say, as with every other flight on this trip our flight back to the UK was delayed, finally pushing back 40 minutes after it was due to, though with a tail wind and some very fast peddling by the pilots we ended up landing only 20 minutes late.

Not that helped much as there was just one person with a buggy to meet the three people who needed assistance off of the flight, and we were the last people left sitting on the plane for a good 15 minutes before we finally made it up the airbridge and onto the buggy back through immigration and to baggage reclaim, though we still beat the bags round!