Today was exciting, because I got to meet a woman I’ve “known” for years from the Simple Savings forum. It’s practically the same as a blogmeet, which are always good. You’ve never met in person, but you already know so much about each other that you just dive right into conversation. It’s lovely.

She probably wondered why on earth I was so interested in seeing the burial place of a queen who, quite frankly, wasn’t all that good at being a queen and was terribly homesick for Paris when she finally moved to Sweden. But it was her life before that happened which fascinates me.

Desiree Clary was a silk merchant’s daughter, who met Napoleon Buonaparte when she was around 15. She became engaged to him very quickly – Napoleon was broke back then and probably had more than a passing interest in the dowry – while her older sister married his older brother Joseph.
Napoleon then went to France, where he met the charming widow Josephine. Desiree was dumped like a hot potato.
A couple of years later, she met Field Marshall Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, and married him.

They were both commoners in Republican France. No one could ever have foreseen that a decade or so later, the Swedish King would need to adopt an heir to the throne. Bernadotte was chosen. Desiree was suddenly the Crown Princess of Sweden.

When the allies defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, Napoleon was going to fight right up to the last man, which would have meant hundreds of unnecessary deaths. The allies sent Desiree, the Crown Princess of Sweden, in to negotiate with him. She emerged holding his sword as a sign that he’d changed his mind and would surrender.

The last years of her life as Sweden’s Queen weren’t all that happy. She never really adjusted to life away from Paris and was terribly homesick.
But I love how the dynasty she and her husband founded 200 years ago is still going strong, while Napoleon’s fizzled.

”What a beautiful church,” said Nina as we walked in. I was pleased that this was new to her as well as to me.

Riddarholm Church is the traditional burial site of the Swedish royals.

I wandered around, looking in all the nooks. I knew I’d find her at some stage, there was no rush. These coffins on the left are made of tin, while the more ornate one on the right is made of pewter. There were quite a few pewter coffins in here.

And then there she was.

Her husband is bundled up in the pink sarcophagus behind her, while her son Oscar is to the left. He’s with his wife Josephine, who was Napoleon’s Josephine’s granddaughter!

I got tears in my eyes when I looked at Oscar’s dates and saw that he died a year before Desiree. How terribly sad.

We all have places that we’d like to see. This was one of mine.

I liked this pink spire. Nina and I were walking to the car where her husband Mark and one of his mates were waiting for us.

She was saying how her favourite royal is Prince Dan. He’s a commoner, the owner of a gym, and he got to know the Swedish Crown Princess when she started going to his gym because it was a private place to work out.
It worked out, alright. They got married.

Mark parked a little away from the Royal holiday house of Drottningholm Palace, and we walked through a very nice garden to get there.

This was given as a wedding present to a queen. I don’t know which one, but it was a couple of hundred years before Desiree.

Every time I go into a building in Europe, Scott’s words echo in my ears.

“Look up!”

Marble everywhere.

These stoves kept the rooms warm in the cold climate. The top was filled with pipes full of oil. You’d start a fire at the bottom, the heat would rise, warm the pipes and heat would radiate from the oil for hours.

Happy snap.

The library.

This bedroom used to be a different colour when it was first built. The queen who received the palace as a gift hated the original colour and changed it to the dark blue.

This caught my eye. So ugly and yet so friendly.

Can you imagine having all of this marble all over your house?

I think this is the only room in the palace that wasn’t ornately over-decorated. It was a bit of a relief to stop here for a minute and recover from all of the gilt and marble.

This was interesting. There was a room which had huge tapestries 200 years older than anything else in there. The tapestries originally belonged to Charles I of England. After he was executed, the tapestries somehow ended up here.
The circular shield that the cupids are holding at the very top of the tapestry is his emblem.

Desiree’s son! King Oscar I. His portrait was in between Napoleon and Queen Victoria… though he appeared larger than both of them.

After the palace, we went out for lunch, then it was back to the hotel for the pickup for the ferry crossing. When Nina and Mark heard which ferry I was on, they said, “Oh, the Booze Cruise!” Apparently on a Saturday night, it’s a third tourists, a third local travellers and a third locals who go to party.

There were a LOT of animals on board.

But look at the tail end of the sunset I managed to catch:

Dad joke of the day: