We spent the first two weeks of August in Scandinavia, starting with kayaking in the Swedish archipelago and ending with relaxing and little biking in the Finish archipelago. Torrey took over 1000 pictures so we are going to have to do this in installments.
Sweden - We rented kayaks, tent, cooking gear etc. in a small town/village about 2 hours east of Stockholm. We learned a few things about the Baltic along the way. First began with a bit of worrying, we forgot to ask the guy at the rental shop about tides? Why is there no sea life, is the Baltic completely polluted? Turns out the Baltic only has very small tides, it is almost completely an inland sea with only a small opening near Denmark. We figured out that there really wasn't tides after our first night and then noticed all the permanent structures so close to the water. Also turns out the Baltic is brackish and as salt water sinks, the surface layer is predominantly fresh water. So this explained the lack of sea life, and the very lake-like look of the vegetation along the edges. Plus the frogs...
We are very fortunate with the weather, it was nice and sunny, but not too hot or cold for the entire trip. We had a thunderstorm the first night, but by about 8am it was sunny again and the waters calm. The water was mostly smooth, but in the afternoons the wind would pick up and make me (Claire) a bit nervous for when we had to cross open water between islands. We also went on the far side of one of the farthest islands and paddled over/through large swells. I made sure Torrey knew that I DID NOT LIKE THIS. However, I think we were probably more safe with the big swells then the occasional wind. We were never truly in danger of flipping our kayaks, except maybe when getting in our out. We both agree that this was the best part of our vacation, very relaxing, beautiful scenery, nice weather, and there is something about the water that is very peaceful. We also ate pretty good for camping too!
Kayaking photos.
We then went back to Stockholm for 3 days, (we spent a half day there on arrival but had mostly gone grocery shopping for our kayak trip). We got the Stockholm card which included museums and public transport:
Here's some pictures from the museum day.
