In addition to being situated on 14 islands, Stockholm is part of the Stockholm Archipelago which contains 24,000 islands.  That’s hard to even imagine.  We left Stockholm at 2:30 and got to glide among hundreds of these beautiful little islands on our way to Helsinki. It was amazing.  The islands vary greatly in size and almost all of them are some variation on the theme of rock plus trees.  Some of them are inhabited and some of them are not. Of the ones that were occupied, some of them had many  houses or other buildings on them, some had only one.  Some of them looked like the entire small island was some sort of camp because all of the buildings were the same. The further we got from Stockholm, the fewer that were inhabited, until by the time we reached the Baltic Sea none of them were and soon there were no more islands.  I suspect most of the houses are summer cottages (although a lot of them are huge and not at all “cottage”-like) because they would be too difficult to reach by boat during the winter months.

Below are a few photos I took along the way from Stockholm to Helsinki. The first of them are just a couple of island buildings that I thought were interesting.

This nice little “cottage” has to be at least 6 bedrooms, don’t you think? 😉

And then this huge ship headed right for us! It was touch and go for a few minutes but they eventually managed to miss us.

Late in the afternoon,, some really mean-looking clouds came up and looked very threatening.

But we managed to navigate around this little storm and soon it was gone.

We should get into Helsinki about 8:30 tomorrow morning and our tour starts at 9:30. Fingers crossed for good weather.