Day Trip to Vaxholm, Sweden
Vaxholm is one of the most popular locations you can find when searching for day trips outside of Stockholm City. It was definitely one of the most popular ones when I was doing our search for things to do while we were in Stockholm. For us it was a great option and we enjoyed our gorgeous Autumn afternoon visiting Vaxholm.
Why visit Vaxholm?
Well, it’s absolutely gorgeous for starters. On the way to Vaxholm, if you decide to get there by water transportation, you get to admire gorgeous scenery of the archipelago as you descend from Stockholm City. It’s a great option if you want to visit a small traditional Swedish Port Village and if you want to take a day or even just an afternoon break from the hustle and bustle of city life. It has gorgeous streets and homes to wander through and it was absolutely breathtaking in the Autumn.
How to get to Vaxholm?
You can drive, if you’ve rented a vehicle, you can take the bus, or you can take a ferry or other water transportation vessel. We opted to take the Waxholmsbolaget ferry from Stockholm City to Vaxholm. We were looking at taking a guided tour through the Stromma tour agency, but decided against it instead, for no particular reason other than we wanted to have some flexibility with our time in Vaxholm. The ferry cost about $14 a person each way, and was easy to buy tickets on board. During the time we were there, mid October, the ferry does not run as often as it does in the Summer, so that was the only downfall that we encountered as we had to wait about 2 hours before we were able to actually head towards Vaxholm. The ferry takes about 80 minutes, it stops by a few ports along the way, and you get gorgeous views of many archipelago islands along the way. You’ll definitely want to get a window seat, and be there early, there were quite a few people standing throughout the journey, and if weather permits, an outdoor seat would be best.
So what can you actually do in Vaxholm?
You can visit the Vaxholm Fortress, which we actually didn’t do but we enjoyed the gorgeous views of it from the Bistro Magasinet in Vaxholm where we had a delicious salmon and bagel lunch. It’s a great bistro with indoor and outdoor seating, the venue indoors is really nice, and the staff were extremely friendly. You can spend some time visiting local shops and doing a bit of retail therapy, or visit a cafe and sit outside and people watch. You can also spend sometime wandering the small quaint streets and taking in all the beautiful homes. You can also rent some bikes and cycle around the island or take a kayak/canoe from here as well. Because the weather wasn’t ideal, we didn’t do either of these, but we saw the shops where you could rent these out.
It was a great 6 hour trip for us including the travel from and to Stockholm City. In the actual village of Vaxholm we probably only spent about 3 hours and that was including sitting for lunch and doing some shop perusing. Coming here in the Autumn was gorgeous in itself, I would think that coming here in a higher tourist season would perhaps not make it as charming and relaxing? Either way its a gorgeous village, one that you want to include in your plans if you want to see a little more outside of Stockholm.
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