Day 22 - Parkrunning and geocaching in Stockholm

It was an early-ish start this morning to catch the bus to Haga parkrun. I was a bit nervous about finding the bus stop with the nearby construction work but need not have worried, and ended up arriving over half an hour early for the 9:30 start. I spent this time chatting with a lovely couple from Basingstoke who are in the city for a family wedding - they have travelled quite a bit and gave me some good tips for Central Europe.

The park itself was beautiful. If I had more energy when I was running I would have taken photos, so you will have to make do with my one from the start.

The RD today was a woman who had moved out to Stockholm from Sheffield. I spent quite a long time chatting with her post-run, but very much enjoyed her first-timers’ briefing beforehand. She was at least honest about the hills! I am blaming the hills for my time this week being slightly slower than last week.

Haga parkrun gets a big thumbs up from me - it was more like a UK parkrun (in that there were marshals and actual tail walkers) and was in such a lovely setting.

I bought some snacks on my way back into central Stockholm and had a couple of hours back in my box to shower, snack and chill, before then heading back out for a bit of lunch by the waterfront.

Re-energised, it was then time to take the T-bana (the metro) about 10km south of the city to Salna, a suburb close to a forest-ed area and seemingly lots of outdoor activities. My reason for going here was to find a very rare geocache - Sweden’s oldest cache, in fact. It is even rarer as it is one of only four remaining caches in the world to have been placed in August 2000. There is a challenge called the Jasmer challenge to find a cache hidden in every month since geocaching was ‘born’ in May 2000, and August 2000 is famously the hardest month, with this cache being probably the only one I would ever have a chance of finding.

It was a lovely walk of a couple of km to GZ, including a small scramble up a hill, and I had just started my search when I had company - another geocacher, from Austria. His name eludes me as I type this, but between us we soon found the cache. We logged some travel bugs and signed the logs before going our separate ways - in my case, back to the T-bana, and, once more, back to my box!

I write this before heading back out in search of dinner, with a plan of also going up on a nearby viewing platform to get some nighttime views of the city. I will report back on this tomorrow.

I am assuming that I will have some kind of internet whilst on the ferry to Finland tomorrow, but if not, I’ll post when I can :)