Cross Country

Our goal today is to get from Oslo to Stockholm. Yeah, the itinerary didn't quite work out perfectly, but I had the airline tickets and started the visa process before we swapped around the direction of our trip...so instead of looping around and ending up in Stockholm at the end, so leaving from there would make sense, we went round the other way and had a long drive from Oslo back to where we started.

Good day for driving, though -- foggy and gray. I fell asleep in the car almost immediately. Mark, fueled by several cups of coffee, was raring to go.

We drove to Uppsala to see the cathedral there, which is amazing.. and huge. It's the largest church in Scandinavia,e ven bigger than the cathedral in Trondheim (which was on purpose, of course). It's a brick church, not a stone one, so Trondheim still claims to be "the best". Mark says I should visit some of the big cathedrals in Germany and France before I'm too impressed by "the biggest". I can't even wrap my head around 500+ foot-tall towers, like at Cologne.

Just north of the modern city (which is a university town -- and college students everywhere are the same, I swear) is Gamla Uppsala, the old (original) town. We stopped to see the small stone church there (the oldest stone church in sweden, apparently) and got an impromptu organ concert. The organist was practicing, so we hung around a bit to listen. Just next to the church are three burial mounds that date from the Viking age.

The car goes back today, so we're staying at the airport, actually -- the hotel is part of one of the terminal buildings. Convenient, and surprisingly comfortable. We cleaned out the car, hauled everything up to the room to repack and winnow thigns down so we can have only carry-ons to Russia, Mark returned the car, and we're done for the day.

Tomorrow? We fly out to St Petersburg for three days. Hopefully we'll have wifi!