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Our third day we adventured out into the Archipelago! I really had very little awareness of just how far west we were from the Baltic Sea. We would have had to spend hours on a boat to really get out closer to the ocean, but since we had limited time, we opted for a quick 25 minute ferry ride to Fjäderholmarna, an island so charming it might as well have been puking woodland gnomes dressed in jaunty sea hats.

^^Check that construction equipment painted to look like a giraffe. Very clever.^^

^^It was a perfect day for island hopping, and the ferry ride was such a neat way to see some of the surrounding islands and landscape.^^

^^Fjäderholmarna was itty bitty, so we easily circumvented the whole island, enjoying all the Swedes sunbathing on the rocks with their families and the quaint craft shops of ceramic, fiber and glass artisans.^^

^^We stopped to admire the timber boats and a small boat museum. Also, the fish heads.^^

^^We dined on the patio of Fjäderholmarna Krog, a lovely restaurant where more mushrooms and fresh seafood were consumed in abundance.^^

^^We couldn’t leave before a dip in the waters of the Archipelago. Granted. it was frigid. But we grew up on the South Shore of Boston where my mother described swimming in the ocean as akin to a bottle of champagne chilling on ice. Yep. That sounds about right for this experience. In fact, one Swedish gentleman watched the two of us wincing and squealing and gasping and declared that we were like Swedish vikings. I would hope that the vikings were more stoic than the two of us, but we’ll take it as a testament to our bravery in the face of icy water. (Ha!)^^

^^I was amazed by the freshness of the water. I thought it’d be far saltier, but as I mentioned, I also underestimated how far we were from the actual sea. The water is described as brackish, but I hardly tasted any salt.^^

^^We then boarded a late afternoon ferry back to Stockholm, where we packed for our trip west. We dined outside at Ramblas, a tapas restaurant around the corner from Maja’s apartment, in the glow of the 9pm Swedish sun. The next day we rose early to board a train to Dalsland.^^