I am fortunate to be able to travel around from time to time. I have traveled across Europe a bunch of times either with my classmates, for job purposes or just for private pleasure.
The last trip I went on together with my wife was really something special. A few years ago we saw some advertisement for Nordkapp trips and we were joking about how one day we will go on that trip as well. And the day finally came!
From the 1st of August till the 14th of August we want on an awesome journey. We knew where we were going but had pretty much no idea about all the awesome things we were going to see.
It all started at 5 in the morning when we got to the bus terminal in Zagreb and found our bus. We were surprised by a large brown envelope on our seats but didn't think much about it for the next 10-15 minutes we were still outside waiting for our tour guide to make sure everyone is ready.
Once inside we opened the envelope and saw many maps and guides for cities we were about to visit. Our guide was collecting them on her previous trips or getting them sent directly from tourist info centers in cities we were about to visit. This was only one of the many awesome things our guide did for us.
After some time during our journey I started to think of her as a walking encyclopedia. You wouldn't hear from here only some facts about places we visited or just passed by but also some stories you wouldn't here in many places. One that stood out for me here was that Finland was a monarchy for only one month (!!!) after which they chose to be a republic (I'll write it up if someone wants to hear the story :)).
We traveled some time and arrived in Nürnberg where we had a nice lunch consisting of their traditional bratwurst and cabbage.
Nom nom
We had some time to spend in the city and I have to say that I instantly loved it! After the allocated 2 hours we spent there it was time to get back on the bus and check in into the first hotel. Each hotel was very good and there were differences between each them but it didn't really bothered me much if some room didn't have this or that since we were only arriving there usually at 8 in the evening and left the next morning at 8. The only thing that was a bit difficult was the inability to open up windows in some hotels despite the temperature being well over 20 degrees at night which made sleeping sometimes a bit difficult.
We continued traveling north and arrived Weimar which was a nice little city. We spent there a few hours and headed north to Rostock. We stayed there again for the night and from here my memories start to get a bit fuzzy. Since I haven't been to Scandinavia except for Stockholm I am having a hard to remember the exact route we took I it's going to be a little more generic from this point on :)
What I know for sure was that we went to Denmark which is a beautiful country. Every country has something that makes them stand out and in Denmark it's their crazy passion for building bridges. They are building so many bridges that I guess they don't even know how many they have. One of the biggest was the one we used to cross the Baltic to get to Sweden. It's just a mesmerizing piece of engineering. They even want to build a bridge from them to Germany so that they don't depend much on the ferries. They even offered to finance it completely because Germany isn't really interested into that :)
Crossing the sea to Sweden was a fun experience and like entering another world because of the fact that we didn't see many trees in Denmark (they have only something like 3% of the country covered where Sweden's forests are covering something close to 70% of the country).
Another thing I found awesome was the huge number of wind turbines we started seeing ever since we came to the north of Germany and all the way up. It's just fascinating to see so many of them on a single place and watch them stand there like some silent giants harvesting the never-ending source of energy our planet has to offer.
Energy efficiency in action...
Traveling north even more you start to realize that the day was getting longer and once we crossed the polar circle (in shorts and a T-shirt since it was 28 degrees warm) night basically never fell and we got our real taste of Scandinavia.
After we arrived in Sirkka, Finland there was no night at all :D I even went for a walk something around 1 in the morning when it was as bright as 6-7 in the morning here in Zagreb.
In the middle of the "night"...
We were only a day away from Nordkapp now. We soon would have our first taste of Norway which is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The nature was just so beautiful that I could spend entire days talking about every single part we visited and not repeat myself once.
We checked in into the northern most hotel of our journey located in Honningsvåg. From the room window I had an awesome view as you can see below.
I could watch this all day long...
After we checked in our guide told us we were leaving for Nordkapp something late in the evening so that we could spend a few hours there and leave a few minutes after midnight (there was some kind of tradition about visiting Nordkapp after midnight).
If the people from Denmark love to build bridges then people here in Norway love to build tunnels. And they build them in a crazy fashion. They just dig out a "tube" place some light in it and open the tunnel for traffic. It's a strange feeling to travel through them in low light close to the actual rock wall.
When you get to the Nordkapp center you get some kind of strange feeling because you know that's it. You can't go "up" anymore (in fact you can but that's not really important). The weather there finally started to look like Scandinavina weather since this was the first time I had to put on a long sleeved shirt. You could literally see the fog coming in and lowering your visibility to 10-ish meters within a few minutes. Then rain came and poured like crazy after which everything went back to being a mix of clouds and nice weather.
All the images above were taken within an hour and a half so I hope you get the idea of how the weather is playing games here:)
Once we arrived to the "top" people start to have a that's-it-now-we-are-going-home feeling but our guide was reminding us that this is just half of the trip, and she was right because we would see so many cool things on our way back that it's just impossible to pull them all out from my memory. I'll just mention a few more things that put a smile on my face. One was the endless number of lakes we saw in Finland. It's just cool to look around and soak in the beauty of it. Another was a "surprise stop" at a small rock covered beach where people stack a few rock on each other and make a wish. And of course we did one as well :)
Making a wish...
Another of the things that stood out was the swim I took in a Finnish lake at 10 in the evening. We checked in at the hotel and went for a walk at the lake after dinner and I was always talking about how this might be the last chance to swim somewhere on this trip so I ran back to the hotel grabbed my shorts and a towel and dipped into the water. It was just a surreal experience swimming in a lake in what should have been cold Finland while the sun slowly started going down.
Swimming at 10 in the evening...
Oh yes, there was one more awesome thing. We met Santa Clause!!! Yes, the real Santa and not someone pretending to be him ;) You could have a talk with him, take photos and even get a recording of your conversation with him (which we didn't know was being taken so it was even better). It was just a nice experience talking to a guy you never saw before but can instantly connect to.
Meeting Santa...
Our journey was slowly coming to an end but we still had to take the ship which would carry us from Finland to Sweden over night. The only thing I can think about the ship is that it's huuuuge. It had 3 decks for vehicles and 9 more for other purposes. They had restaurants, bars, casinos, discos, duty free shops and a ton of other stuff that leave no room for boredom.
We went to sleep but woke up again at 4 am to watch how the ship passes through the Stockholm archipelago. It's just awesome to watch such a huge ship silently sneak around these islands.
Once on land again we continued to travel "south" and arrived in Copenhagen. You could really see that Denmark was the Scandinavian "top dog" in the past because it's got wealth written all over the city. Everything is so alive and you can see that the people here enjoy life.
Walking down a busy street we found a Lego store and I was just like in heaven. So many things to see here and so little time. I can't wait for their store to open up here near me in a month or two :)
We took two more ferries and were back in Germany where we went to Lübeck and enjoyed the nice city and an amazing marzipan cake in one of the most famous places in town, the Cafe Niederegger. The cake was "like a fantasy" as one of the guys who traveled with us put it.
So much to choose from...
One more day and we were home. The last day was the longest of them all because we spent more then 15 traveling (it could have been an hour and a half less if there wasn't a Slovenian jackass police officer at the Croatian-Slovenian border but I don't really want to think about it).
All in all it was really a journey of a lifetime and I'll keep so many more memories with me. I am amazed by all that the winter-defying, bridge-building, ocean-conquering countries have to offer but couldn't fit here because the post would quickly turn into a novel. If you would like to hear more let me know and I'll be more than happy to tell you some other stories :)
Until then, keep smiling.