Stockholm 🇸🇪

This week we visited Sweden for the first time, heading to its capital city Stockholm for a short break. 

Tuesday, 9th December 2025

We headed to London for my usual free airbnb lovely sister’s flat. We had a gorgeous few hours catching up and enjoying a scrummy curry before we had a mildly early night before our flight the next day.

Wednesday, 10th December 2025

Happy birthday to dad! 

We had a luxurious start to the morning with no early start (at least for me, Cait was moaning about her 06:30 wake up call) and an easy tube trip to Heathrow. It was a bit more expensive for the later start and BA, but well worth it. Our travel was without problems, including an on time (!) bus service to Stockholm centre to find our hotel. We had a quick walk around the area before we got a veggie hotdog from 7-Eleven - a minor recurring theme of this holiday for Mark. 

This is an octopus donated to us by Caitlin, who was aghast when she heard we had no cuddly friends coming with us this holiday. I meant to take photos with him/her around Stockholm, but then it was raining and I was lazy.

Thursday, 11th December 2025

We started off the morning with an excellent breakfast at the hotel - obviously a waffle with caramel sauce and sprinkles. Never too old for sprinkles. We then made our way over to the Gamla Stan island - we were staying at Downtown Camper nearby - to see the Old Town. 

Om nom nom nom nom.

We browsed a cute Christmas market before visiting the Nobel Prize Museum, which wasn’t quite as good as we hoped it to be. It was mainly objects donated to the museum from previous winners that had little significance to the actual awards or Alfred Nobel. For example, a previous winner’s ski gear was donated - a known hobby of his but not actually related to his award. We would have liked to see a few good sections on significant Nobel Prize awards - for example: black holes, ending apartheid, penicillin, DNA, Red Cross, MKJ, quantum mechanics - to name a few. It would have also been interesting to know a bit more about the background of the prize and about Alfred Nobel. It was cool though to see that the recent Nobel winners (awarded just the day before we visited) had already signed their chairs - a tradition in the Nobel Bistro cafe.

I did get some octopus photos here. 

As usual we found a bookshop for me - sci fi and fantasy! My perfect bookshop, I could have browsed for hours. Instead, I got what I visited for - some guinea pig items from a Swedish artist I admire from afar. Gamla Stan is very pretty, with old 17th and 18th century colourful buildings. We enjoyed our (slightly damp) walks around there and the river. We even glimpsed the end of the changing of the guard at The Royal Palace. 

Cathedral & Royal Palace 

That evening we headed back out to see the Nobel Week Lights, which were illuminations dotted around nearby to celebrate Nobel Week. Some were inspired, like the light box representing gravitational waves, whereas others were just fun to bop around. The rain steadily picked up until we returning to our hotel looking rather damp. 

    

We dried off before heading out for dinner at Moyagi just around the corner from our hotel. 

Friday, 12th December 2025

On Friday we started with visiting the Avicii Experience. Avicii was & still is one of Mark’s favourite music artists, and it was poignant to see the impact he had made with his life. It was pleasantly empty and interactive so a good visit. 

We then again wandered to Gamla Stan, this time for souvenir shopping. Oh, the dilemma of choosing the right magnet and Christmas decoration. We found a cafe for Fika which was cosy but with humorously   disinterested servers!

Were these decorations an acceptable choice?

Most of the rest of the day was spent staying inside and dry, enjoying our window seat and making progress with our books (I finished 2 this trip, yay!). We went out for dinner to Verte, a Swedish vegan restaurant, but the experience was somewhat dampened by being sat essentially in the corridor next to the toilets. That evening we also tried out the hotel’s rooftop bar, which had fab views - but at £17 per drink it was definitely a one time treat! Expensive food was a theme of our trip, which we knew going into it but was a little irksome nonetheless. And then mum is blogging about her £5 dinner for 2! 😉

Our window seat!

I liked these little letter boxes. 

Saturday, 13th December 2025

Happy 9 years to me & Mark!

We wondered outside our known zone and headed to Söderman island, a bigger island to the south, to find a viewpoint. Quite a misty day, but lovely views still! I particularly liked their local Christmas markets, selling trees and food next to open fires. We’d considered heading to the ABBA Museum, but weren’t so keen on it that we fancied £20 each - although I will get Mark to watch Mamma Mia 2 soon. 

We rounded off our Swedish trip by going to Ikea (of course) for some delicious (and cheap!) plant based meatballs. We ate them in bed as we watched Home Alone 2 - bliss. 

Sunday, 14th December 2025

Back to the UK today after a wonderful 5 days in Sweden. We would definitely recommend it!

An abundance of visitors

It's been a busy few weeks for us in the Adams-Bennett-Haldane household!

Last weekend Mark's friend Evo (a nickname, but still weird to hear his girlfriend calling him 'Matt') and his girlfriend visited us. It was lovely to see them, and we went for a climb with them on Sunday with Mark's other friend David - 3/4 of the Liverpudlian quartet. Later that day we bought our Christmas tree - the last day of November still felt too early, but as our week ahead was full up, I didn't want to wait any longer! I love my tree 😊

This week also involved my first and only Christmas meal this year, which I engineered by organising myself. I require 1 Christmas 'do' per year to keep myself feeling lovely and seasonal. We had a great turnout of 14 climbing ladies, and I had a lovely time, although next time I'll have to invent a scheme to get us all rotating for more chats. 

This weekend mum & JC visited us. On Saturday mum & I started with 2 free hot drinks in the John Lewis cafe (not sure how I managed to get that random voucher seeing as I rarely shop there), before heading to the National Museum Cardiff and meeting up with Mark. We were glad to leave the heaving city centre for a bit - it's a Saturday in December! I've actually never been to either of the museums in Cardiff centre (the other being Museum of Cardiff) despite living here for over 3 years now. It felt quite like Exeter Museum with it's exhibit of stuffed animals and naff cafe, but we probably didn't give it enough of a chance as by then we were all thinking about lunch! We were impressed to see some Monets and a Van Gogh however. 

Mum spotted some shiny gold markers on the floor (always looking for survey markers, I'm not sure how she doesn't bump into people more). She'd discovered the Cardiff Centenary Walk, and is now insisting we start from number 1 and complete it in order next time. Fine. Lunch at a busy but yummy Crumbs cafe before heading home to start our first jigsaw of the weekend. We finished it just in time before our chinese delivery came - yum! Mum very graciously acquiesced to my request of a caterpillar cake (well, she asked me if I wanted her to bring any food!), so we scoffed on that too. 

On Sunday mum persuaded me to go out for a run in the rain - I've been slacking/busy with work and life/not liking the dark, so haven't been out to run recently. I'm glad I did! Or I was glad until 15 minutes into the promised only 20 minutes run she asked if we could do 5km - maybe not. Once dry, we completed a quick second jigsaw and I made dad his birthday card. We waved them off in the wind back to Ottery just as the F1 final race concluded - congrats Norris. 

Mum has been busy with crafting, and made us a lovely engagement present of a crocheted decoration with a sparkly stone all the way from West China 🥰

Another busy few weeks ahead - yay for December! 

PS - I beat mum to this blog, ha!

Bunny, dog, and baby

 This weekend I travelled up to Sheffield, my alma mater, to see my lovely friends. I stayed with the gorgeous Katharine & Jack who treated me with delicious food - a special shout out to Kath for entertaining me with 10 charity shops on Saturday. I even managed to obtain a Christmas jumper! (I am as surprised as anyone else that a Christmas-lover like me took this long to buy one). We also visited my favourite Sheffield park to see the squirrels, the Sheffield Botanical Gardens, and I had the best pastry of my life from Crumbs (cinnamon bun focaccia - wow!). On Saturday night we even watched my first Christmas film of the season - Love Actually.

I especially enjoyed getting to see Peanut (bunny) and Ottie (dog) - they are cute enough that I will stroke them*.

*I have a mental graph of cuteness to risk ratio, where if an animal is cute enough I will suffer the consequences of allergy. Less cute animals do not pass and therefore do not get stroked. 

I think dad would not mind if I moved to Sheffield so that he could access these baked goods.

On Sunday we met up with newlyweds Alex & Joe, and new parents Liv & Joe. And me, newly engaged! What an exciting time. A fabulous pub roast with plenty of catching up before we had a cuppa at Liv & Joe's new home. The main excitement of the day was meeting baby Boddye - Robbie! Much broodiness going on here (much to the displeasure of my dad...). 

What an excellent weekend. Although it happened that I was the only one working the next day and the only one with a 4.5hr journey home - next time, all are welcome in Cardiff!

Managed to get photos of the baby & new mum, but no other photos of us!

Dad & dinosaurs

This weekend dad popped up for a visit. Mark was in Liverpool celebrating his birthday (abandoning me for cake). 

On Saturday we headed to Bute Park for a wee walk, stopping in the newest Brodie’s Coffee for some delicious cake. I’d slightly spontaneously bought us tickets for an Autumn Internationals (now called the Quilter Nations Series after a wealth management company but still sounding cute) rugby match: Wales vs Japan. We had fairly low expectations for the match but it turned out to be a brilliant one! Ending 24-23 to Wales, it was a nailbiter the whole way through. For dinner we enjoyed a scrummy Indian takeaway and watched the Dead Poets Society - I’d not seen it before but I can very much see why it’s a classic (despite falling asleep for about 20 minutes in the middle). 

On Sunday we again found some sweet treats, this time down at Brød in the bay. Dad has been keen to visit the dinosaur footprints in Penarth so we headed over, popping into the RNLI station there to find out a more. We had a lovely chat with a gentleman who has written a couple of leaflets on the footprints and their geologic history. He assured us (after we’d had the opposite assurance from the RNLI crew members standing outside) that despite it now not being low tide, we’d have enough time to walk there and back along the beach. We ummed and ahhed a bit, not wanting to risk getting caught out in the tide or going against RNLI advice, but given we could see the end of the sea wall where the footprints were was only a short distance away, we headed there. Apparently these footprints used to be thought as being formed by large rocks dropping into the ground rock when first found in 2009, but in 2021 some researchers confirmed that they were dinosaur footprints from the Triassic period. They used to have claws before they were worn away by erosion. The footprints were not very obvious, but you could see several in a row at places. Cool!

Craft-ember

We’ve not been up to much in the past few weeks - working 2 weekends in a row will do that to you - but I have been getting into the crafty season.

A couple of weeks ago I had some friends over for a craft afternoon, and we made mosaic coasters! Spot your favourite (mine):

Pre and post grout!

I made a cute paper star garland for the living room door (not photoed well here):

And have started a fabric star garland from an old tea towel: 

It’s going to take a while…

Meanwhile we’ve been enjoying Autumnal times, including the weather, leaves, food, and pumpkin carving!

I liked these pumpkin cervical dilation decorations at work:

And I finished a 1000+ page book but am struggling with my current 180 page one:

Fiction > non-fiction.

One more work weekend to go and then none until January! I enjoy the work itself but I do dislike the sensation of suddenly realising it’s Monday and your free time has gone. 

Fun things to look forward to include Mark’s birthday (he’s off to Liverpool but I can’t quite face the 4h drive when I’ve only got the weekend off), a Sheffield trip to see my university friends, and then it’s December! Crafting wise, I’m very excited for What a Curly Life’s annual felt decoration adventure patterns!