ScandiTrip 2006

We got in this morning around 10am. The overnight cruise was sort of strange but interesting. Aside from all the cabins, it has about 6-7 restaurants, a casino, and a nightclub. However, we spent most of our time on the deck watching the beautiful Swedish archipelago go by. Many pictures.

Helsinki is small and modern. Not much in the way of narrow winding streets or old castles. But, we did see the famous "rock church", which was carved out of solid rock and has a circular copper roof. The acoustics in side are excellent and there was someone playing the piano while we visited.

Helsinki also has an excellent national history museum. It is well laid out and walks you chronologically through Finish history from the stone age, through the middle ages, and into modern times. The best we've seen on this trip.

We booked a day trip to Tallin, Estonia for tomorrow. We leave and 8am and will be back a bit after 4pm. The boat trip takes about 90 minutes each way, so that should give us plenty of time to see this very old capital city. Looking forward to it!

Probably post again tomorrow (since our hotel has a nice internet station!).

-ge

Sorry about not posting recently. We were unable to get internet access while in Stockholm. Our hotel's internet station was out of order and the near by kiosk rip us off for nearly $2. The bastards. Anyways, despite the lack of access to the net, we had a great time in Stockholm. I am typing with just a few minutes of time purchased on board the Silja, which is our over-night ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. It is amazing that this ship has internet access. Welcome to the 21st century.

Not sure I can now remember everything we did while staying in Stockholm. We had 6 whole days there and did many things in town and did several outings as well. The highlights were certainly the Vasa museum. This was a Swedish warship that was built in 1628, but sank on within 20mins of being launched. Bad for 17th century Sweden, but great for today, as there is a giant, almost entirely complete, 400yr/old ship for us to look up on. Amazing! Lot's of pictures that I will post as soon as we get home.

Yesterday we took a ferry over to an old Viking settlement called Birka. There has been much archiological excavations here with findings dating back to the 800's AD. We got a great guided tour and also had time to just explore. Great trip.

The day before we made our way up to Uppsala. This place is also well known for it's viking past that includes a series of large burial mounds. Very interesting.

Besides these outings, we spent much time in the old part of Stockholm known as Gamla Stan. Wonderful old winding coblestone streetings and no less than 3 old churches (one Swedish, one Finnish, one German) all in one island.

In addition to Gamla Stan, we wondered around the rest of town a bit. Saw several musums besides the Vasa (old ship) museum. Probably the best of those was the National History museum. Great prehistory and viking times exhibit.

Well, running out of our 2.5 Euros of internet time. Will try and type again in Hellsinki. But, we will be back in Portland on Sunday and will do some wrap up then as well as begin to post all the photos (we're talking thousands, folks)...

:-)

We spent our last hours (and Danish Krones) in Denmark today. It was a bit of a mop up mission. Yesterday got called on a count of weather. The plan yesterday was to see some various sites around Copenhagen. We managed to get to Roskilde, the site of a nice little town, cathedral, and interesting Viking museum. Then, it was on to Hillerød, which boasts Denmark's nicest castle called Fredriksborg Slot (slot means castle). But, as we toured the amazing castle, it started to rain. Rain hard. Like, really really hard. It kept raining, and raining, and raining. Eventually, we had to walk back to the train station. However, we were only in the rain for a few minutes before we were soaked. Ugh. After that, we decided to cut the tour short and head back to the hotel room for change into dry cloths.

So, today we set out to finish our trip from yesterday. However, we had to check out of our hotel and move our luggage to a train station in southern Sweden called Malmö. This is the train station that we will depart today (overnight train) to Stockholm. They have giant lockers in the train station that both of our big packs would fit into. Then, we got on a train that was headed back to Denmark and up north to a Helsingør.

Helsingør is famous for a certain castle called Kronborg. Big deal? Well, the English call this castle Elsinore as in the castle in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Although the guide books are quick to point out that Shakespeare never visited this castle, and the (barely) historic Hamlet died several centuries before this castle was built, the local tourism board still plays up the connection and has many plaques and banners with Hamlet references. That's especially important on the interior, which is sparsly furnished (compared to the more impressive Fredricksborg castle from yesterday). But, we still enjoyed the tour and took many pictures (mostly of the exterior). Then, we took a ferry across the stait to Helsingborg, Sweden.

Helsingborg is a bit larger than Helsingør. However, it's castle was trashed by the Danes several wars ago and all that is left is a single tower. Despite this, Helsingborg has a very nice old town with winding coblestoned streets. We spent an hour or so here before hopping a train down to a college town called Lund.

Lund was very nice. It has a huge grey cathedral with beautiful twin towers. But, the highlight of Lund was it's open air museum (our third). More like Århus' than Oslo's, the museum featured a cluster of 3-400yr old open-timbered old houses, most of which were open for us to go into. Lots more pictures here.

Then, it was back to Malmö. Malmö's castle was closed by the time we got to town, but there is this huge music festival going on. The streets around the main town square are packed with people and we could hardly walk threw it. We finally found a cafe on the pedestrian only street that had an opened table. We had a very nice meal and I had a local beer (pilsner, but still flavorful). Ahh.

That's it for now. Tomorrow, we'll be in Stockholm.

We're starting day 3 in Copenhagen. This is the great city that all the guides claimed it would be. It reminds us at times of Amsterdam and at times of Paris. Not only are there canals, there are lots of winding streets that end with some giant important building. All over the old part of town there are huge beautiful buildings like cathedrals, churches, museums, and government buildings.

Copenhagen has the longest pedestrian only street in a major European city: the Strøget. This is fun the first time or two that you walk it. It reminds me of how Portland is trying to reduce it's no-auto zones rather than increase them (the bus mall). It is too bad that they can't do something like the Strøget in Portland.

On day one, we had an uneventful trip from Århus to Copenhagen. We got in around 3pm, checked in, and spent the rest of the evening exploring the winding streets. We hopped an hour long canal cruise, which took us around the harbor and pointed out some of the more incredible sights seen from the water. In the current-events department, they took us past some 200+ year old boat sheds built to hide their ships from the English. Several of them had burned down two nights earlier. Too bad.

We had dinner in Nyhavn, which is where most of the iconic pictures of Copenhagen's harbor come from. If you do a Google image search of Copenhagen and see pictures of a row of colorful wooden buildings along a harbor, that's Nyhavn.

Yesterday, the museums were all closed so we just did some more hiking around. We toured an old castle, saw the "little mermaid", toured an old citidel, discovered an old windmill, watched the changing of the guard, and just did a bunch more touristy sort of things. Today is museum day and we hope to see the at least two major musums include the National Musum. Tomorrow we plan to do a little more train hoping and explore the near-by region that includes several more castles. We'll have one more day, perhaps for Tivoli (the famous amusement park), then it's an overnight train to Stockholm.

Tomorrow we take the train to Copenhagen, but today we enjoyed much of what Århus has to offer. And, we are very impressed. The central part of town features many of the things that we always hope to see in Europe like narrow winding streets, a beautiful 1000 yr old cathedral, and a cafe lined pedestrian-only canal street. But, for me, the best part is the "Den Gamle By" (the old town) which features a cluster of over 70 relocated renaissance buildings and houses from Århus and the surrounding areas. Lots of pictures! The strangest part is that this city (the second largest in Denmark) seems nearly undiscovered by tourists. We had no problem getting a reasonable hotel near the center of town, none of the attractions are particularly crowded, and the price for food and such is much less than anything in Norway. In fact, unlike Norway, we have yet to encounter another American.

However, the journey here was not without it's bumps. We caught the ferry from Kristiansand without problem, but we were a little confused as to how to begin our journey south to Århus. The travel guides said something about a connecting train, but provided no details. So, we did find signs directing us to a little train, got on, only to find that we cannot proceed without purchasing tickets from a machine that only takes Danish currency. When I asked the train conductor about this, he got a bit testy and proclaimed "Vee are in DENMARK now unt Vee use de Danish KRONE! If you do not purchase ticket, der is 600 KRONER FINE!!" Geez. When asked what to do, he suggested we get off the train, go to a minibank (ATM) "und get some Danish krones!!!". The next train was in an hour. After I got some cash from the ATM back at the ferry terminal, we got on the next train, bought the tickets, and road the train to the next station. No one ever asked to see our ticket. For the rest of the day, I could here that guy squealing "Vee are in DENMARK now unt Vee use de Danish KRONE!" Too funny. In all fairness, we have been in Denmark now for about 48hrs and everyone has been very polite and patient with us, except the "Vee are in Denmark now" guy.

So, this little train took 20 mins to get us to the next city which had a national train stop, where we could catch a train that is included with our rail pass. However, when we get there, we find that our connecting train has been canceled. Oops. Now what? There was a little travel store at the station, but no information booth or ticket desk. So, I just happened to see a guy who was wearing some pants that had the national train system's logo on them. He said we could wait an hour to catch a train to Aalborg (about half way to Århus). Jenn managed to pickup a schedule of trains out of Aalborg and figured out that we would have no more than 3 minutes to make the connection. When we got to Aalborg, we were lucky that there was a line of people trying to get on the next train, otherwise might have left on time without us. Ah, we were finally on the right train to Århus.

That's it for now. Next stop: Kobenhavn a.k.a. Copenhagen!!!

Well, it's our last night in Norway and we are spending it in a "resort" city of Kristianstand. We're typing from an internet cafe with bad music and confusing rules. Apparently many Norwegians come to Kristianstand (the southern most city) to vacation, but others, such as ourselves, use this town as a way to get to Denmark. Tomorrow we will take an express ferry across the strait to Hirtshal, Denmark, then take a train to Århus, Denmark. Århus (OUR hoos) is the 2nd largest city in Denmark and is the unofficial capital of the Juteland peninsula. It's the only part of our tour where we will actually be on continental Europe. We plan to stay in Århus for two nights then head on to Copenhagen.

Yesterday was a busy day of trains, trains, boats, buses, and another train. We left Oslo at a little after 6am and began our Norway in a Nutshell tour. We saw a glacier up close, many many waterfalls, and an amazing boat trip in a fjord. Beautiful.

We got to Bergen and found that we had been bounced from our hotel room. The good news was that they booked in a slightly nicer place across 1 block away for the night. The bad news was that there were no more rooms available anywhere in Bergen for the next night. None. Notta. Don't even ask at the TI office...

So, after doing the quick quick tour of Bergen with a walking tour and a fanicular ride (wonderful city, too bad it rained the whole time) we took an express ferry down to Stavanger, Norway. Nice trip. We had a beautiful sunset just as we were pulling in and now were off to explore the city.

Tomorrow, it's another train ride to Kristianstand where we will catch a ferry on to Denmark.

-ge (sorry, no spell checker here...)

I got a call from the front desk about 10 PM last night that my luggage had arrived. Yippee! I only had to go about 9 hours without. Of course, I have no idea where it went.

Today has been a busy museum day. We started out at the folk museum. The folk museum is a huge open air museum with old wood buildings from all over Norway. Most of the buildings were disassembled and brought to the museum to preserve them. It was really cool.

The second museum was the Viking ship museum. They have two really well preserved Viking ships on display and part of another one. They also had a bunch of other Viking artifacts.

Then it was off the maritime museum, the Kon Tiki museum and the Fram museum. All three featured boats. After awhile, I got a little tired of looking at boats. :) The Kon Tiki was rather silly after seeing the Viking the ships. The Kon Tiki museum featured two boats that were recreated primitive boats that some famous Norwegian guy sailed in. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been so tired, Greg doesn't agree. He thought it was a waste of time.

We went back downtown after that and rested. The jet lag is still kicking my butt and I'm not quite on Norwegian time yet. It's only three more hours till I get go to sleep.

Well, we made it. It was a long flight, but for the most part not too bad. We made our connection in Frankfurt and got into Oslo around 12pm local time. As I try to type this on a Norwegian keyboard, I realize we've been awake for about 26hrs. Ugh. We're trying to stay awake here until 9pm local time so that tomorrow goes better.

Unfortunately, although we're in Oslo, we're not exactly sure where Jenn's bag is. Mine showed up fine, but it appears that our flight between Frankfurt and Oslo had too much baggage and Jenn's got bounced. We're hoping that it will show up later on tonight. The airline promised to deliver it to the hotel.

We've already decided to stay one more night in Oslo, if only because we couldn't get a train reservation to Bergen until Tuesday the 15th. Oh well. The plus side is that we are assured a window seat on what is reported to be the most spectacular train ride in all of Europe. We are also fully booked for the Norway in a Nutshell tour. Fun!

Our first outing in Oslo was a nice walk in the sunshine, at first. After we got many blocks from our hotel, a thunder shower went through. We both got soaked and since Jenn doesn't have any cloths she is now wearing some of mine... :-)

More soon...

Geez, can you believe our luck? We get married on the hottest most humid day and begin our honeymoon on an elevated terror alert. Ugh. It was kind of funny that Jenn was complaining yesterday about not getting enough water on our last flight and so we picked up a couple of large bottles of water for the flight today. Guess we'll be leaving those at home...

Next stop Frankfurt then Oslo!

This time next week we'll be on a plane to Norway. As you can see below, we'll be prepared...