Countdown to holiday

Only five nights to go before off on another Northern Grand tour.


View Holidays 2010 in a larger map

After the Eyjafjallajökull eruption earlier this year, we were more than ever looking into surface transport options. But what started out as a relatively straightforward attempt to get to Helsinki using surface transport turned into a 3,300 mile trip to Finland then meandering back to the UK via Sweden and Norway.

Atomium

Brussels:
Our favourite place for a weekend break but only a Friday night here this time. Really pleased that a couple of good friends from Amsterdam are coming down to join us.

Köln: Thanks to Deutsche Bahn´s online service we were able to get a single ticket London - Rostock which allowed us to break our journey. It took a little bit of playing with the parameters on their booking website but the time spent was worth it. Less than £150 in first class all the way and ticketing for both of us on a single sheet of A4 paper.

Rostock: First new place on this trip. Another Hanseatic League town for us (and a connection with our old friend Tycho Brahe) but it´s because it´s Germany's largest Baltic port that we´re coming here. A second sheet of A4 paper is our ticket to Helsinki. 36 hours on the Finnlines ferry via Gdynia in Poland. Unfortunately, it doesn´t arrive in the harbour that you see on all of the Helsinki postcards, but can´t have everything.

Helsinki Station

Helsinki: Weekend in one of our favourite cities. It has been too long since we´ve been here in the summer. But hopefully the weather will be a bit more comfortable than it has been recently. Excessive heat, smoke from forest fires and storms are not what we´re looking for. Know there´s nothing can do to placate the weather gods, but in the past they have often been kind to us.

Then a few days in provincial Finland seeing places we´ve never been to.

Savonlinna (literally Newcastle) - famous for its Opera festival, less well known for the mobile phone throwing world championship. Regrettably we arrive a day late to catch that.

A manor house near Mikkeli.

The University city of Jyväskylä.

No idea what to expect other than being asked "You´re from London - why are you here?"

Turku/Åbo is our next stop. Like Rostock it´s basically to get on a ferry. We´re not known as early morning people so the Best Western right at the terminal is a good choice. We´ve stayed there before and were more than happy.

Likewise we´ve stayed in the Åland Islands before. First time was more than a decade ago - on our way from St Petersburg to Stockholm by train and ferry. Five years later we had no hesitation in repeating the mid-Baltic experience.

Planning the trip we expected the next stop to be Stockholm. But when we started looking for a hotel there was NOTHING. What´s going on, we wondered? Bit of research turned up the European cardiology society annual congress with an expected 24,000 delegates. According to Stockholmtown.com The Greater Stockholm Area offers almost 23,000 hotel rooms. No surprise there´s no room at any inn.

So, instead we´re taking the route less travelled. Between Åland and the Swedish mainland there´s a ferry route Eckerö<->Grisslehamn. Don´t get the feeling that it´s going to be as much of a booze cruise as Stockholm-Mariehamn.

So, where then to go? We decided on the city of Uppsala. We´ve had a daytrip there before, but never stayed and it´s on the railway line north from Stockholm which was important for the routing that was forming in our minds.

Last stop in Sweden: Östersund
On the shores of Storsjön (The Great Lake) it looks like a great stopping off point for a night. The lake´s got its own monster as well (allegedly). Will report back on that one.

Then it´s back to places we´ve been before, across the border in Norway.

Trondheim the last time we were there

Trondheim. Last time we were here was on our 10th anniversary trip that took us from Tromsø through Lofoten to this pretty city. Not sure can add much to out posting from the time. How the hell did I miss out on the cake buffet that time?

After Trondheim we have our second trip on the Hurtigruten. We seem to be doing this in little bits rather than a complete journey. According to the timetable we should be on the MS Polarlys.

Final stop Bergen. Last time we were here was in the summer of 2001 having taken the train from Oslo. Memorable trip that!

Regrettably, we couldn´t spare the time to continue with surface transport back home. So we´ll be in the welcoming arms of SAS to get us back to Gatwick and real life.

Depending on WiFi and inclination we may or may not be updating this en route.