Trip Summary: Grand Total: 6,600 kilometres, 31 days, and 9 countries. Over a month has passed, and it's beginning to feel like the trip was a long time ago already as our Finnish summer has kept us steadily occupied from the moment we arrived back. With the seasonal wild berries and mushrooms, we can be found in the forests during much of our free time, foraging ,in spite of mosquitoes and mooseflies, as well as in the kitchen cooking and preserving - and of ...

Well we'd stayed every other kind of place on our trip, why not a Swedish hippy commune to end it off? Not understanding Swedish, it was difficult to figure much out from the few B&B options for the area over their webpages. We ended up choosing something with promising pictures - a country house some 20 kilometres outside of the town. Perhaps we should have paid some attention that there were various links attached to the website, including something abou...

Marcelus ("Hamlet") said it first! Not our favourite place heading out, and no better on the return - I'm sure there is much good to be said about Denmark, but we seem to have no luck here. We had hoped for another Kiel type of location as Denmark is renowned for its beautiful white sand shoreline, and were meant to end up at something that sounded absolutely wonderful - a farm location by the shore. Due, however, to human error (in this case mine) with severa...

We had done many things so far on our journey, but one thing was still missing: beachside and swimming - so we aimed now purposely for the coast. Although the drive was long, landing us just past 6:00 pm at an apartment-hotel within a stone's throw of the shore, hours of roasting away in the car made us quick to jump into our bathing suits and race out the door. The North Sea was a brilliant blue, the sand just the right toe crumbling texture, and the beach no...

At this part of the trip, having earlier borrowed extra days here and there, we were left with only overnighters. Amsterdam, of course, warrants more than that, but we honed in on a few activities that we hoped would give ourselves a reasonable impression of the vibe and layout of this historical city. We had found a boutique hotel on special offer over the Internet the day before, and were happy to discover on arriving that we even had a view of the small adja...