There are some places where time behaves oddly. Gilwell Park is one of them. Today I went back for the 100th Gilwell Reunion — and realised, slightly alarmingly, that it is forty years since I attended my first one. I was 22 then. I should make clear that I haven’t been to every Reunion in…
. . The final morning of a holiday is mostly about luggage. We packed, repacked, checked the weight of the bags, moved things from one case to another and eventually established that we could get ourselves and everything we had accumulated over the past ten days back to Britain without having to wear six layers…
Copenhagen feels noticeably busier than Stockholm. The streets seem fuller, the pavements more crowded and the soundtrack considerably more international. We set off this morning to explore properly on foot. The city is compact enough that walking seems the best way to understand it, although by the end of the day our feet may have…
Our last morning in Sweden began with another excellent breakfast at Bomans in Trosa. Mark discovered pancakes with lingonberry jam, which seemed an appropriately Swedish way to start the day, before we packed the car for the final time and set off south. We had a fair distance to cover, but by now we have…
We have done quite a lot of walking on this holiday, but today managed to combine a gentle morning stroll to the End of the World with an afternoon involving a palace, fika, some impromptu foraging, rocky forest paths, an observation tower and several extremely wobbly suspension bridges. Sweden continues to deliver. We began in…
After three very full days in Stockholm, today was about saying goodbye to the city and beginning the journey south. We weren’t in any particular hurry, with Trosa only about an hour away, so there was time for one final Stockholm experience as we headed the car out of the city. Our choice was Skogskyrkogården,…
Mark’s birthday could hardly have begun better. We were enormously fortunate to spend the day exploring Stockholm with Migo Goldberg, a qualified official guide but, much more importantly for us, an old Scouting friend.We first met Migo at the World Scout Jamboree in 2007, when he was leading the Swedish team doing its reconnaissance for…
Today we left the car firmly where it was and set out to explore Stockholm properly, taking the Tunnelbana from Gärdet to Östermalm and beginning at Östermalms Saluhall, the magnificent food hall which has been feeding Stockholm since the 1880s. It is exactly the sort of place in which we can happily spend far too…
After yesterday’s rather special immersion in Göran’s Småland, this morning began with breakfast overlooking the water at our extraordinary Björn Ulvaeus-owned hotel in Västervik. Göran joined us before we finally said goodbye and set off on the next stage of our journey: Stockholm. Rather than heading immediately for the main road, we took the prettier…
Today Sweden changed. Not dramatically at first, but as we drove north from Karlskrona the open agricultural landscape of the south gradually gave way to something that felt much more like the Sweden we had imagined before coming here. More trees, more lakes, more red wooden houses and, eventually, great stretches of forest disappearing off…
