On the ferry to our annual Estonia trip.

It’s just me and Adrian this time. Ingrid is off in Boden doing her military service; my brother chose not to come this year.

We drove from Stockholm to Kapellskär to take the DFDS ferry to Paldiski. It’s just over an hour of driving, and towards the end there are quite a lot of lorries which I presume are all heading for the freight harbour. For lack of better entertainment during the trip, we paid some attention to the lorries. A few of them were branded “AB G Persson”, which at first glance sounds like a Swedish limited-liability company (AB for aktiebolag, and “Persson” being a very common last name). A solid, reliable name. Then we noticed the link to a Latvian website, and concluded that it was actually a Latvian company masquerading as a Swedish one.

DFDS is boring but efficient. The only thing I truly dislike about them is the on-board satellite network that you get forcefully connected to without any meaningful choice. There’s an SMS you get upon connecting, but by that time it’s too late – in the two minutes it takes to disconnect, you can already have racked up hundreds of kronor worth of charges. Our new routine is to turn off all mobile connectivity the moment the ship leaves the harbour, and not turn it on again until we know that we have docked.