We spent a week in Lithuania (Lietuva). We booked an AirBnB for a week in Vilnius with the idea of doing a couple of day trips outside of the city. One of the hard things about travelling for a year is being continuously on the move. We have been moving so fast through Scandinavia and the Baltics. We decided to slow down a bit by booking a week at a time. Vilnius...
We had four nights in Riga, Latvia. I probably should have written this post while I was still in Riga. Please do not tell Estonians, Latvians, or Lithuanians I said this, but there stories are similar. They have a healthy/friendly rivalry and regularly tease each other about it. While they are all Baltic countries and they have a lot of similarities, there are still...
Tallinn, Estonia is a UNESCO World Heritage site for its well preserved medieval old town. It was founded in the 10th century as a place where merchants came together to trade. In the 13th century, the Danes settled it and established a fortified city called Reval. It remained named this until 1918. For all of this time, it has maintained its Estonian language...
When I posted on Facebook that we were going to St. Petersburg for 72 hours, there was some feedback that it wasn’t enough time. A little explanation of why such a tight amount of time. Normally, a visa would be required to visit Russia at all. However, from Helsinki you can go on a 72 hour visa free trip if it is an organized trip. To be visa free, you need to book...
Lately we have been doing a lot of free walking tours and so I wanted to do a quick post about what they are. I am sure you could google it so I will keep it brief. In many cities that draw tourists, there are companies that provide “free” walking tours. Type “Tallinn free walking tour” (replacing with the appropriate city name) to find whether there are any...
A very quick introduction to geocaching. I am not going to go into great detail. If you are interested you can look at geocaching.com or the link below for specific details. Basically, geocaching is an outdoor activity in which we use a gps or smartphone to navigate to cleverly hidden “caches” that have been hidden by other geocachers. By logging into geocaching.com...
I thought I would switch things up a bit. I have been doing posts about multiple places in one. Even though I haven’t done a post in about a week, I am going to break it up into multiple posts… Helsinki, Finland Inside a metro station… we see Calgary, Winnipeg and Thunder Bay As I last posted, we moved to Helsinki on a tight schedule. We got to Helsinki late on...
Hello from Helsinki, Finland. This is a quick update regarding the cruise we were on. It was the MSC Preziosa and we departed from Hamburg, Germany and travelled up the coast of Norway, to Svalbard, and then back down the coast of Norway returning to Hamburg. We left Hamburg and flew to Helsinki the same day we arrived. A quick note about Hamburg as we were there for...
I will start by saying sorry that this is so long. That is what happens when I take too long in between posts. Okay… so I admit I have been slacking off in the posting department. We have been on the move pretty fast and frankly I could have used the bus and train time to write a post… but I didn’t… sorry. I am writing this post on the bus from Copenhagen to Hamburg...
Nicola thought we should do an Iceland post to wrap up the campervan things we learned. I decided to expand that a little to include all of our lessons learned. This may seem like a jumble of things but nonetheless good things to know. Campervan Lessons Of course you need to remember all of the costs when you plan a campervan holiday. In all, we travelled about 2500...