Sat May 16th - Second trip to the boat this year, really looking forward to some sailing after spending the long Easter weekend cleaning, polishing and antfouling! Having stocked up on groceries at home, we decided to hire a car for the day to get down to the marina from Arlanda airport. The drive was much more relaxed now that we were familiar with the many tunnels under Stockholm. We decided to stop off and do the remainder of our shopping en route and found ourselves in Sabis (the Swedish equivalent to Waitrose) - great range of produce and very friendly/helpful staff, but managed to spend over 1000Kr on a few bags of fresh groceries and bottled water! We arrived at the marina at around 5.30pm and thankfully Geoff had a pretty good idea as to which pontoon we were on, having followed the launch via the webcam, otherwise it could have taken some time trying to find the boat amongst the 1,400+ in the marina - it was great to see her in the water! Unfortunately, the batteries didn't seem receptive to the shore power so we were reliant on the natural light for the evening, but being so far north it doesn't get dark until after 10pm. When we'd been here in April, there didn't seem to be any gas for cooking but it turned out that it just needed time to make its way through the pipe to the cooker...who knows when it was last used?! It was late by the time we'd unpacked everything, so decided to take the easy option and have pasta for supper. The marina was really quiet during the night with hardly any wind - not the usual clanking of cow bells, so slept relatively well apart from Geoff's snoring!
Sun May 17th - Woke to a glorious blue sky at around 8am and decided to have breakfast up on deck. After a quick trip to the marina shop to buy a new connector for the shore power, we managed to get the domestic batteries charging up. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said about the engine battery - totally depleted. We decided to head back to the airport car hire around 1.30pm and after a few stop-offs via the local chandlery and a more economical grocery store called Willy's (much to Geoff's dismay) returned the car by the deadline for the one day fee (circa £52). I thought it would be a good idea to try the coach into town, thinking it might have taken us direct to the bus station where we needed to catch the bus to Bullando. The terminus is however central station and, having taken 20 or so minutes longer than the train, we only had 15 minutes to get to Slussen (wherever that was) to catch the bus or have a two hour wait so we jumped into one of the many taxis waiting. A well spent 150 kr got us to the Slussen bus station in plenty time and after a quick discussion with the ticket salesman about which tickets we needed to purchase, jumped on the 474 to Hemmesta for the first leg of our bus journey to Bullando. As we were approaching the terminus we passed 440 bus for Bullando and so jumped off at the next stop and hopped straight onto the 440. The total bus journey only took 1h20m, which is not much less than it would have taken by car from central Stockholm.
Just to clarify - I was dismayed at the stopping off at another grocery store not the fact that it was called Willys (which of course I thought was tee hee worthy)
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