Planning the Holiday

Those of you who have travelled with us on our previous years' blogs (all the blogs are available at the links on the right for anyone who wants to relive the experience!! - at least they are on the desktop version, so if you are reading this on a mobile you may want to select the desktop option to access those links) will know that planning the holiday is as much part of the holiday as the journey itself.

I suspect this is the holiday which has been in the planning for the longest of all our trips. Back in 2019, when we returned from our wonderful trip to Alaska and Hawai'i, I began putting ideas together for the summer of 2020. That draft document, dated 8th September 2019, proposes a route like this:

• London St Pancras to Amsterdam (Possible Change in Brussels)
• Amsterdam to Hamburg (5h 36m with one change at Osnabrueck)
• Hamburg to Copenhagen (4h 58m – Direct)
• Copenhagen to Gothenburg (3h 38m – Direct)
• Gothenburg to Oslo – (3h 52m – Direct)
• Oslo to Bergan – (6h 32m – Direct)
• Bergan to Olden – (5h 55m by Bus – Direct)
• Olden to Trondheim (7h 34m 3:34 by Bus to Otta then 3hr train to Trondheim – Overnight) 
• Trondheim to Stockholm (11h 15m by Train, change at Storlien)
• Stockholm to Helsinki – Ferry (10 hr 30 min – Ferry then Train)
• Helsinki to Tallinn – Ferry (2 hr 30 min)
• Tallinn to Riga – Train or bus (4h 25m by Bus)
• Riga to Vilnius – Train (4h by Bus)
• Vilnius to Warsaw – Train (via Minsk - 2h 30m from Vilnius to Minsk; 9h 12m Minsk to Warsaw)
• Warsaw to Berlin – Train (6h 36m – Direct)
• Berlin to Brussels – Train (7h 20m – via Cologne)
• Amsterdam to London – Eurostar (2h 1m – via Brussels)

You'll see I'd even looked at travel times back then! 

As it was, all the booking I'd done by the time Covid-19 came along was booking accommodation in Olden, so it wasn't hard to cancel the plans before we got to August 2020 when travel outside the UK wasn't possible. 

Of course, in the years since 2019, things have changed. The idea of travelling anywhere via Minsk, the capital of Belarus, at present isn't practical with the war in Ukraine. A re-routing from Warsaw to Vilnius is now one of the fun parts of this trip, as the two countries have different gage railways!

Then, with Drew taking on the six Super Halfs challenge we ended up travelling to Denmark in 2022 as you can read in this blog, so didn't need to build in time for Copenhagen. 

[On an unrelated point (these blogs often have crazy unrelated wanders into my psyche) I find typing Super Halfs really hard I want to use halves which the Grammarist says is correct. But just as Dwarfs (common English) and Dwarves (Tolkien English) are both potential plurals for Dwarf, those who promote the Super Halfs use this form!]  

So, we refocussed the journey this year from its initial Scandinavian focus, reversed the route and then looked at the amount of time we'd like to spend in each city. Our spreadsheet got tweaked early this year from the initial, over ambitious, route to our current plans. It also means we have a challenge to visit various places in Scandanavia in more depth. Inspired by the travels of my friend Lloyd and his wife, Chrissi, for their 20th wedding anniversary - well recounted in their blog - in April this year, we will save the trip to northern Scandanavia to another year and get up to the wildest north then, not just the Southern parts of Sweden and Denmark we will pass through this year.

Tomorrow we will be beginning our journey, I look forward to you joining us as we make our progress across the Northern nations of Europe.