Tough Viking

Tough Viking is the leading, largest and most brutal Obstacle Race in Scandinavia and Russia. The obstacles are massive and consists of fire, water, electricity, deep mud, monkey bars and barbed wire set out along a challenging route. The obstacles are designed together with the Swedish elite maritime special forces unit Kustjägarna.

We participated in the Tough Viking competition in the much easier "spectator" class. We actually went to cheer on the Embassy team and enjoy the nice summer weather for possibly the last weekend. None of these pictures are of the Embassy team since this is a publicly visible blog so they're just random tough vikings.

The entire course was 15 KM with 30 obstacles. We stayed on the left side of the map and watched some of the more interesting obstacles. If anyone wanted to watch all of this then they probably should have joined as an actual competitor. It was spread over a huge area even with some of the winding back and forth so it would have been difficult to see everything.

Stockholm Zombie Walk

Once a year in Stockholm there are zombies. They go for a walk through the city.

We're having a little nice weather for a few weeks so it was actually sunny and 73F. Summer appears to be unusually short this year with a bit more umbrellas and jackets needed compared to our first summer here. But I digress so here are the zombies...

Foreign Service Administrative Promotion

Kolmården Wildlife Park

Pairi Daiza in Belgium is a really awesome zoo we visited earlier this year. We have a zoo near us in Sweden which was good too but wasn't quite as big. This is a regular looking zoo but it has a couple of unique things. There's a cool indoor dolphin show with huge video screens adding to the show. The real highlight of the zoo is a cable car safari dangling us over the animals like fresh meat box lunches. LOL

Kolmården Wildlife Park is about an hour and a half away from Stockholm. We rented a car for the day to get there. Since it's Sweden they gave me a Volvo station wagon as the smallest car with the luxury option of an automatic transmission. I'm a silly American who hasn't been driving manual all my life. I learned the basics a couple of decades ago but I'm not going to try to pick that skill up again unless I really need it. It's definitely not going to be during a rental car day trip.

Our daughter's pictures of the day (click on them to enlarge):

Stockholm Pride Parade

Stockholm's Pride Parade is the largest in Scandinavia with as many as 40,000 participants and over 400,000 spectators. There was some rain in the forecast but fortunately it didn't rain on this nice happy parade. It was also warmer than it has been lately. #LoveWins Our daughter took some great pics of the event:

Birka

Birka was a village on the island of Björkö in Lake Mälaren about 2 hours west of Stockholm by boat. Birka was an important trading center with the rest of the world during the Viking Age in the 8th-10th centuries.

This UNESCO World Heritage Site was a day excursion with Strömma boat tours. The excursion included a guided tour from an archaeologist. He was both informative and entertaining as he walked us around wearing a period costume. There were recreations of some of the wooden houses and boats from the time but the town site is just an open field now.

On the way to Birka

Views Above Stockholm

One last bit of pictures from last week and playing tourist with our tourist friends. (Yes, it was still cool enough for jackets in July) We finally went up in the SkyView on top of the Ericsson Globe Arena. We've been inside the Arena several times for concerts but hadn't gone up in one of the viewing gondolas crawling up the outside of the world's largest spherical building. It's a fun way to see Stockholm! After that we went to our favorite overlook walk along Monteliusvägen for another view above Stockholm and closer to the old town of Gamla Stan.