Day 6: Stockholm
And more sunshine! With spirits  high and hearts aglow, we lept onto our trusty steed (with Peter the driver and Signe our tour guide) and were driven the 600 km to the ferry at the border of Sweden and Denmark. We drove through Christmas card forests (sans snow) and past Lake Vattern, the third largest of the 90,000  lakes in Sweden being 100kms in length. It was the flattest countryside imaginable and featured grass, barley and rapeseed farms. Farmers here keep about 20 head of cattle comfortably sheltered in barns where cows have their own mattresses. It makes for better quality milk, you know. 40% of power is produced by windmills. We drove through Husquvarna which was established in the 1930s as a highly successful industrial town producing the wide range of appliances still so popular today.
We reached the border at 3.00pm when the coach drove us into the ferry. Think our Cook Straight crossing only this was 20 minutes. You can buy duty free cigarettes for 10 minutes (the Swedes are heavy smokers) then when a horn sounds, you can stock up on alcohol. The Danes and Swedes are no longer at war but there is a fierce divide. From the ferry we could see Hamlet's castle at Ellsinore. It is just a 30 minute very flat drive to the CBD where stands our opulent Radison Blue hotel.
There was a short turnaround before we re-boarded our coach and were driven to the world famous Tivoli Gardens now celebrating their 175th anniversary. This is one big fairy-tale theme park with endless varieties of entertainment and restaurants. We scored the last table in a Germanic restaurant on the lake where I was introduced to my very first Amber Lager to accompany my Weiner Schnitzel. So far beyond what my tastebuds had experienced. We then followed this with a Danish ice cream. Well, you know, when in Denmark .... The sad thing of the day was that our coach returned at 8.30pm. We could have stayed on if we wished, but it's finding our way back that's the problem. Tivoli has now taken the #1 position in my list of theme parks. We so wished we were  brave enough to stay on for the rest of the evening when the illuminations created a mind-blowing fairyland.