Boating

For my birthday Honeybuns had given me a boat trip on Gustafsberg VII, and now it was time to cash in on it. The weather wasn’t the best, but we might have to wait for ever for that the way this summer has been going, so now was as good a time as any.

As usual we were a bit late in the start, so had to run a bit, but made the boat in time. There were not particularly many other travellers, so we got good seats at the front. As we got under steam, we found that we had a tour guide, pointing out the usual landmarks long the way. I think it must have been the guide’s first trip, or at least I hope it was, as the exposition was less than smooth, with, odd pauses, and the English translation was clumpy. In particular century numbers were difficult—they are one off from the way you say the years, but is it one lower or one higher? We got both variants.

Still, the archipelago is as it is and it was nice to glide through it. In Gustavsberg we had a couple of hours and decided to eat as a first priority. The restaurant that I had been to on my one previous visit to Gustavsberg was gone, but we found another one. It looked like any random pizza place, but they turned out to serve huge portions of quite well-prepared food.

Before returning to the boat I located birthday presents for the sisterly children in the factory outlet. On the way back we sat in the aft saloon in very comfortable easy chairs.

Går det så går det

Looking at Trumpeter’s USS England I decided that a Buckley class destroyer escort would be a nice thing to build to improve my ship modelling skills. References are of course needed for a good build, so I did a search on Amazon and lo and behold, there was even a book specifically on USS England. But…the cover picture? And what does the star “High quality content by Wikipedia articles!” mean?

A search unearthed this investigation by Chris Rand. Apparently what’s going on is that some guys hit on a brilliant idea: Write a script that downloads a Wikipedia article, follows the links to some pre-determined depth, concatenates all the gathered material and calls it a book. Repeat for all articles in Wikipedia. Print on demand and charge an outrageous sum = profit! There are already thousands of “books” under the imprints of Alphascript and Betascript being distributed through Amazon and other web shops to unwary shoppers happy to find a book on the obscure subject they were investigating.

Beware! Beware!

Steaming about

This morning Honeybuns and I got on a train pulled by good old B 1136, travelling towards Nynäshamn. The heavy weather pushed down the coal smoke and often made it hard to see the landscape, but I eagerly peered at the surroundings, that in spite of being close to Stockholm, were unfamiliar to me. (So, we'd gone there by car quite often when I was a kid to see relatives, but that hadn't really left any impression.)

The railway station in Nynäshamn is in the harbour, where the boats for Gotland leave. At the time there was a Polferries boat in, the Gotland boat only coming later in the evening. It seems like the tracks used to go all the way to the harbour, allowing cargo to be transferred between ship and rail, but these days only commuter trains and the occasional museum train comes here.

There is a fairly large marina as well, catered to by tourist traps in little houses. These had been supplemented by stands for the Christmas market. We had lunch, which was decent, but rather expensive, confirming the tourist trap nature of the place. The market contained nothing remarkable, but I got myself a smoked trout and a jar of cloudberry glögg concentrate.

We made an excursion to the town centre, where there were also a couple of stands huddling in the drizzle—the children's merry-go-round did not feel at home in the winter weather. However, the local book store and haberdashery, respectively, yielded useful supplies.

As we returned to the harbour, the rain intensified, and we jumped on board S/S Blidösund. On board the ship was also a jazz orchestra and we ended up sitting right next to it. When we had left the harbour, we had a bit of rough sea until we returned into the shelter of islands and as soon as the deck was stable enough to stand on, the orchestra started to play. I can enjoy listening to trad jazz, but I have to admit all songs sound the same to me. I wonder if this is due to the orchestra actually improvising, and thus not really following any particular tune. Sort of a wall of sound, more than melody.

We had dinner on the boat. The two French ladies who were placed next to us, and who I tried to translate the menu for (well, what does “Blidösund hot dish” contain? We had to ask the waitress) took the opportunity to transfer to an empty table, leaving us to our « romantique dinneur ».

The ship trip took considerable longer than the train ride, but eventually we ended up at Skeppsbron and walked to the central station for the ordinary boring public transport home.