After leaving our hosts we bicycled to downtown Stockholm and boarded a passenger-only ferry which steamed on a 3-hour journey through the Stockholm Archipelago. The archipelago is an incredible array of literally thousands of islands, some large and inhabited (but usually car-free and accessible only by boat) and others are merely bare rocks just poking above the surface. The ferry snaked through small channels and then into large expanses of flat sea, then back into intimate passages and back out again, dropping off the occasional passenger and/or supplies in a docking maneuver that took less than a minute.
Our final destination was the island of Uto, and our campground was just outside the town where the ferry docked (one grocery, one restaurant, perhaps 30 homes). Except for a group of young girls we were the only ones camping. We quickly pitched our tent by the water and biked to our first beach on the Baltic sea where we read and napped and walked on the sand. At night we got our first taste of the futility of sleeping this far north; the sun sets around 11pm and then comes back up at 3am when the campground trees filled with squawking wood ducks. We used earplugs, eye masks, and cocktails of beer, sleeping pills, and ibuprofen but I think stronger barbituates are necessary to combat this problem.
This was taken the morning we left, when we biked to the southern end of the island to catch another ferry. We were the only ones at the small dock waiting for it.
And this is typically what we had in front of us for most of the day.
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