After Keswick I went to nearby Carlisle, which is near the border with Scotland. Hadrian's Wall is also nearby, and marked the extent of Roman settlement in ancient Britain. I see from descriptions that you have to go a bit out of Carlisle to see the wall so I think it's not in my pictures.
I took a couple of pictures of the city to record my passage.
I had decided to take a west to east train service to Newcastle-on-Tyne just to be able to say I had been there, before returning to London. I can't even be certain that these photos are from Newcastle, but I remember it the hour was in the late afternoon so the gloom fits. I remember the train service was slow because it was a cross-country route and not a major north-south route.
Presumably this is a pedestrian street in Newcastle. It doesn't look like a London scene. I also don't remember whether I overnighted in Newcastle or took a night train back to London. Probably the former. So really the detour was to avoid retracing my outbound route from London to the Lake District.
This is the imposing ferry I arrived by. It was like a floating hotel really, and I imagine a civilised way to travel if you had a berth.
Helsinki is a severely neat city. Somehow I felt that suited its northern clime. This is its cathedral. All these places have long tongue twisting Finnish names so I try not to misspell any.
I found a small market. I always enjoy browsing at markets. I must have been intrigued by these furs. They were sleek to the touch.
I rang up Päivi, the girl I had met back in Nice. Obviously there was no Internet in those days so she must have given me her number. We met and she showed me a place to have an economical lunch.
She took me to some of the sights of Helsinki. This is the interior of Temppeliaukio, a Lutheran church that is embedded in rock. A very modern design which attracts a lot of visitors.
Sibelius was the Finn most familiar to me, from his music. His compositions evoke the stark beauty of this northern land. This sculpture is dedicated to him.
I corresponded with Päivi sporadically over the next few years. We lost touch when she got married.
It's a long train trip from Oslo to Stockholm, about 10 hours, so it's most likely that I took the overnight train. I found that there are two pictures of Uppsala, a handful of pictures of Stockholm, and Helsinki after that. So I come to the conclusion that I either stayed only one night in Stockholm or not at all, and explored it in more depth the second time through. Sleeping on overnight trains to save on accommodation and time was a strategy I used a few times. But you miss the landscape in between.
I needed somewhere to while away a couple of hours, and Uppsala which is about an hour north of of Stockholm seemed as good as any. Uppsala University is the oldest in Sweden.
This is the cathedral, probably the grandest in Sweden as Uppsala is also the ecclesiastical centre of Sweden.
The main street of Uppsala. If my guesstimate of my visit date is correct, it would have been a Saturday morning and this would account for the lack of traffic.
There are some good pictures of the Stockholm archipelago as the overnight ferry cruised towards Helsinki, so this time I'll merge the photos from the return visit with those of the one-day first visit.
