I feel like one of my Mother’s kindergartners who, when asked if he wanted to share anything for Show and Tell, put his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth before finally looking down and saying, “I don’t have nothing to tell.”

It was a uneventful but  l-o-n-g  trip.  Five hours to Newark, 3-hour layover, and then another 9 to Stockholm. It was a beautiful landing – everything around Stockholm is so green and there are lots of beautiful trees.  Once we landed, we got our luggage and then waited for other red-badged passengers from different flights to join us before we got on the bus to take us to Stockholm, about a 45-minute drive.  Several other travelers in our group discovered that their luggage had decided not to join them afterall so the long wait was followed by the filling out of the necessary paperwork.  While we waited I saw this clever SAS flight attendant come flying by on her pink scooter to claim her luggage from the adjacent baggage carousel.  I wanted to get a photo of her flying down the corridor balancing her luggage on her scooter, but in spite of how long we all waited, her luggage never arrived.  It’s good to know that the airlines show no favoritism in whose luggage they lose!

The bus that took us to the ship had its own tour guide. Amazing!  He was an adorable man from Ghana with a dry sense of humor who gave us some interesting facts about Stockholm: it extends over 14 islands linked by 54 graceful bridges, it has a population of about 2 million, and the city is very clean (and incredibly green).  The gorgeous old trees below lined a long driveway.

We saw several of these in fields along the freeway from the airport to the ship.  Anybody have any ideas what they are?  Time to do some research.  We did, however, also see several McDonalds, Burger Kings, 7-Elevens, Circle K’s, and Shell Stations. No research necessary.

Lots of public art works.  I especially liked these oversized ants crawling up the green poles.

It appears they started disembarking the ship of its previous passengers beginning at 1:30 a.m this morning.  1:30 A.M.!! We were allowed onto the boat about 10:30 a.m. but weren’t able to get into our rooms until 1 p.m.  That gave us a couple of hours to explore the facilities and have some lunch on board while staff tidied up and changed the sheets.

There are many LED “photos” in various places around the ship.  One of them in on the first level at the top of the grand entry staircase.  This particular one is about 40 feet tall by about 30 feet wide (a guess) and it just appears to glow from within and is absolutely mesmerizing.  And every time we go through that area it has changed.  I’ve included 2 of them below – the photos don’t do them justice.  You’re probably going to see more of them over the coming days.  We also saw some smaller “standard” sized “photos” in the restaurant where we had dinner tonight but I didn’t get a chance to take pictures.  Those were different yet in that the pictures didn’t change but the flowers in them went from dark to glowing in one of them and in the other, the petals fell off.  I’ve never seen anything quite like these before… but then I don’t get out much.

On one of the islands across the waterfront from where the ship is docked is an amusement park.  Cool!

There a huge wall across the road behind where the ship is docked and all day long people have stood, sometimes a few, sometimes a lot, often for long periods of time, on the sidewalk on top of the wall looking our direction.  What are they looking at?

Tomorrow is our city tour of Stockholm and hopefully things will get a little more interesting. See you then,