Day 12 - Wednesday 3rd May 2023

Today we'll be travelling from Gothenburg to Stockholm. We'll be hoping that today is not as rushed as yesterday. Luckily we've got blue sky again. It was only 2C at 6am. We'd had a better sleep because we had some control of the air conditioning temperate and the quilts were not too heavy.

Bags had to be outside the room for collection at 7am and we had breakfast in the hotel restaurant at 7am. When the bus left at 8am, we had a new driver, Laslo. Everyone in the group was on time. I noticed that there are USB charging ports under the luggage racks above our heads.

In contrast to yesterday's farmlands, the countryside here has small rocky hills with pine forests. Every now and then we would pass a lake before coming to a much larger lake which is the second largest in Sweden. The motorway took us along the south eastern side of the lake.

The cafes that Gennady used to stop at are no longer open and so at about 10:30 we stopped at a service station for a break. It was a good choice because it had a shop and a very pleasant view of the lake.

At about 12:30pm, we stopped for a lunch break on an outlet on a bridge across the motorway. It reminded me of similar restaurants on Italian motorways. The cafe had one menu in English with pictures. We could point to the pictures to specify what we wanted.

Just like the place where we had stopped for morning tea, this place had a few poker machines.

Back on the bus, part of Gennady's commentary talked about the European Union and various other treaties for money and border control.

We reached our hotel, Hilton Stockholm Slussen, at 3pm - earlier that expected. Because of nearby bridge construction work, our driver had difficulty finding a way to get to the hotel entrance.

Our rooms were ready. We thought we were getting a king size bed but instead it just had two separate single beds pushed together. Each bed had separate quilts.

There was a circular table but no writing desk. The bathroom was marble lined and has a shower in the bath.  Wi-Fi speed was about 30Mb/s in both directions. The safe worked. The room looked out on the building next door.

The design of the room was unusual - there were hidden cupboards. When you find the handle, the cupboard swings out into the room.

For the evening outing, we met downstairs at 5pm for a short bus ride to the ferry wharf nearby. The ferry departed at 5:30 and took us past the city to a more rural location.  At about 6pm we got off the ferry and walked past a row of cute holiday houses to find our bus waiting for us again.

Our destination was a restaurant (Langa Raden) in a rural location about 20km out of Stockholm. It's a beautiful area - green grass, trees, soccer ovals, horse paddocks and a lake. The road leading to the restaurant was very narrow in parts - too narrow for two-way traffic.

Gennady had asked us yesterday to specify what we wanted for each course. Suzy had Salmon and I had beef. We each could have two drinks and so Suzy and I both had two glasses of red wine while Chris opted for beer.

It was an excellent meal. Another opportunity to chat to our fellow passengers and to get to know them better.

The setting was picturesque. Earlier as we had been getting off the bus, there was a light shower. This had now cleared and, as the sun was setting at about 8:30pm, the reflections off the lake and the sunlight hitting the trees made for a very pleasant setting.

Heading back to Stockholm, the clouds presented an attractive sunset ahead of us. We were back at the hotel at about 9pm.