Sweden 1998

1998 was a special year - not only was it our 25th Wedding Anniversary, but also David's 50th birthday. Knowing how much Swedes love to celebrate anniversaries, we had no hesitation in choosing Sweden for our holidays. To celebrate properly took nearly three weeks, starting on the west coast going up to Göteborg, then on the Göta Kanal for a six-day cruise to Stockholm, and then down the east coast for a few days. Click on any of the pictures below to see a full-sized version! (About 15 seconds to download).

Borenshult

The Göta Hotel and morning waffles!

Our boat "Diana" at Vadstena

Berg

Göteborg

The six days on the canal take you through some delightful parts of Sweden, busy and quiet, industrial and country, and this time round, wet and dry! Swedes were complaining about their worst summer for years, but that still gave us glorious sunny days where it mattered such as at Borenshult, Berg & Vadstena. As this was our third time on the canal, we could also find interest in the navigation and other aspects of the cruise.

The west coast becomes increasingly hilly as you move south from Göteborg through towns like Varberg and Falkenberg (Jazz Festival) towards the narrows off Kullen separating Sweden from Denmark, and most famously at Helsingborg. We took the bus from Copenhagen airport to the Elsinore - Helsingborg ferry, then train and bus between towns as we progressed northwards, visiting Mölle and Kullen lighthouse en route.
First lunch at Helsingborg

Norrköping

"Katthult" (near Vimmerby)

Racing at Borgholm

Rosenbom at Karlskrona

	Kalmar Castle
	The east coast also has its variations, but we saw more difference in the towns, from industrial Norrköping, through Astrid Lingren's Vimmerby (Pippi & Emil books), the regional centre Kalmar, the holiday town of Borgholm on Öland, and the naval base of Karlskrona - where there is a Naval church that requires a special marriage licence - just like we had to get 25 years ago.

One special birthday treat this year was a digital camera for David. He has always been very keen on photography, but had noticed that in recent times once his slides came back from Kodak, they might get one projection and then be put in the cupboard never to be seen again. So he decided that a decent camera, lots of batteries and memory, and a reader for the computer might make us look at his pictures more.
You can see the results above, scaled from the camera's 1280 x 960 resolution down to 640 x 480 and then saved with a JPEG compression factor of 30 - 50 to keep the resulting file size less than about 50KB - so there's some slight loss of quality. Hope you enjoy them - the camera has created a lot of interest both on the holiday and since.
I've put together a few notes on using my digital camera.