Scandinavia

In two days, we start our trip to Scandinavia. This is a trip that we had planned to take in 2020, but of course COVID-19 derailed that trip. It is actually a modified version as the first trip included a cruise which had a stop in St. Petersburg, Russia. While we would still like to visit the Hermitage and see some of the other sights there, it doesn't seem wise to travel to a country at war right now, so Russia is off the itinerary and the cruise was replaced with several flights on SAS and a roll-your-own set of travel plans.

So why Scandinavia? The easy answer is that it is an area of Europe that we have never been to so why not? We start with an eight-hours flight from Newark to Stockholm, Sweden, and then a one-hour flight to Oslo, Norway. We spend three nights in Oslo and then fly to Copenhagen, Denmark, for another three nights. Then a flight to Helsinki, Finland, for a five-night stop. We substituted the visit St. Petersburg with a daytrip to Tallinn, Estonia. It takes slightly more than two hours to cross the Bay of Finland on the Eckerö Ferry to get to Tallinn, so we'll have about seven hours on the ground there before we have to head back to Helsinki. Enough for a guided walking tour and a couple of meals.

When our time in Finland is done, we'll take an overnight Ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm across the Baltic Sea on Viking Line's MS Gabriella (seen on the left). Of course, we could have flown, but where's the adventure in that and taking the ferry seems like something we wanted to try. We have our own stateroom on both ferries, so it's like taking two mini-cruises. We will spend three nights in Stockholm and then fly home the next day. Seventeen days and five countries later.

So, the next question is what are you going to do? With so little time in each country, we are limited. There isn't time to go far outside any of the five cities so we're just going to concentrate on seeing as much as we can in the cities by taking guided walking tours and riding Hop On Hop Off buses. We plan to see the Kon-Tiki and Munch Museums in Oslo, Tivoli Gardens and the Little Mermaid Statue in Copenhagen and the ABBA Museum and the Royal Palace in Stockholm, just to name a few of the more well-known places. We're also looking forward to trying some unique Scandinavia food, which we'll report on in future blog posts.

One final clarification as I've never been sure which countries are considered Scandinavian, so I looked it up. In short, Denmark, Norway and Sweden are part of the Scandinavian Peninsula and only the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish people refer to themselves as Scandinavian. Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark are all Nordic countries with Scandinavian roots and cultural ties.