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There are more photos on Flickr and still some others on Instagram (search for dbender54).

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Storkyrkan is Stockholm’s Cathedral.”Storkyrkan was first mentioned in a written source dated 1279.For nearly four hundred years it was the only parish church in the city. It became a Lutheran Protestant church in 1527.”

The cathedral is very ornate, with a silver altar from the 1650’s, a seven branched candlestick from the 15th century.

There are a number of tombs in the cathedral floor. The vaults are numbered, which is good, because after 400+ years of feet shuffling over them, some are unreadable. The dates I see come from the 1650’s-1750’s.

There are rows of seating reserved for the Royal family when they attend.

There’s a Last Judgement painting, but it’s so huge (30′ high? by 20: wide?) and you can’t get far enough away with “George” getting in the way, so the picture isn’t the best.

Storkyrkan, though a cathedral, has a fairly small parish here on the island of Gamla Stan and has to charge admission to help sustain itself. Worth every SEK.

On the way back, we spotted a Viking doing some souvenir shopping for the boys back on the longboat.

Crossing one of the bridges, there’s a diver doing an inspection of the bridge.

Though it’s about 5pm here as I write this, the streets aren’t particularly crowded with commuters going home. We’ve been impressed with Stockholm, though there’s a lot we did not get to see due to time constraints or fatigue. Except for one day when we had some intermittent drizzle, the weather has been beautiful with temperature in the upper 60’s-mid seventies. We’d really enjoy coming back to explore the island where the King’s residential palace (Drottingholm)  is located and the museum on the same island.

I looked at our car rental agreement for Iceland and found we drove 800 miles in four days. Considering that the max speed limit is 90kmh in some places (54mph), that represents a fair number of hours driving. The scenery there was just amazing. We found though, that if we go back, the best thing to do for exploring other sections of Iceland (like the North or further east from Vik) is to not make Reykjavik the base for all of those trips, it’s just too far to drive out and back in a single day.

We leave tomorrow for the return back to the US. Long flight with connections in Noway, and the UK before returning to the US.

Now back to the hotel to retrieve our luggage and over to the Central Station to catch the bus to the airport and our hotel.

Fortunately not our hotel, but on the way into the airport, there is a decommissioned 747 which is called Jumbo Stay.

If we could rest in the hotel for the next three days, we’d be ready to go again!