Visby, Gotland, Sweden – July 21

This morning we entered the land of the Vikings. Visby is a tourist town on the Swedish island of Gotland. We thought it would be a lot like Banff or Dubrovnik, but it is a bit less frantic than those – this is nice. We are anchored today in this smallish port, so getting off of the boat is a bit more of a production. Apparently this ship typically has 3 tenders (the small boats that ferry us back and forth in ports that the ship cannot dock at,) but only 2 are operational currently. The fact that the ship is down one tender makes things a bit slower, but we pass the time happily with Champagne on the pool deck.

Our tour description is a 3 hour long walking tour only appropriate for the very physically fit – needless to say we were fine. The town isn’t very hilly, but as usually has wonderfully cobblestoned streets that can make walking a bit precarious – as I said…we were fine.

I thought today’s tour might be one to skip as we have at least one tour each day and when we get to St. Petersburg have 2 each of the 3 days. We have no ‘days-at-sea’ and are not enjoying the ship as much as we could if we weren’t in port each day. I’m glad we didn’t. A lot of what makes a great tour isn’t so much the content or the location, but the guide – we had a wonderful one with a great, loud voice who could tactfully refocus the discussions when one man from California wanted to give us his own lecture on the differences between Redwood trees.

We started at a Viking museum which was fascinating. We have visited many of these ‘small-town’ history museums and this one is certainly the best. As I said, probably a lot to do with the guide. We saw runes, coins, models, skeletons accompanied by the guide’s commentary.

Next we strolled the town stopping here and there to hear a story about this building or that. We visited a botanical garden (the Redwood story) which was stuffing and a church.

We abandoned the tour just before its end to have lunch of…you guessed it…pizza. We really did try to find an Ikea or meatballs, but it was pizza that called us. We were told in Copenhagen that Swedes go to Denmark to get married because the alcohol prices are lower. This scared us a bit, but we found the prices a bit lower – a surprise in this very touristy town.