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| Calgary to Montreal |
The Scandinavian countries have been on our bucket list for quite a while and this summer we got there. We left on Thursday June 25 and were back home on July 21. The first part of the trip was a bus tour with Trafalgar Tours. We had good reports from a number of people about the company. It was a very well organized tour; we met some lovely people from different parts of the world; and especially enjoyed the Norwegian fjords..
I don’t think we’ll be taking another bus tour anytime soon. I want to be clear that the arrangements were great and we saw things that we wouldn’t have seen any other way. For us, there was simply way too much sitting on a bus.
The tour started in Copenhagen. We spent 3 days in Denmark, then took a ferry to Norway where we spent 8 days. Our last stop was Stockholm where we spent 2 nights with the tour. After the tour ended we stayed in Stockholm for 3 more days and then flew to Gallivare in Lapland where we got on the Inlandsbannen, a little one car train that steered from either end. We spent 5 days travelling down to Mora where we stayed overnight before boarding another train to Stockholm to spend one more night before flying home.
Something else we confirmed that will inform our future travels is that we’re not city people. We made the most of our time in Copenhagen and Stockholm but both of us were relieved to land in Gallivare, a small town in the middle of nowhere whose main industry is iron mining. It was nice to get out of the crowds even though Stockholm was relatively empty according to the locals.
To get to Copenhagen we flew from Calgary to Montreal and from Montreal to Copenhagen.Our first aircraft was an Airbus 220 and the second was an Airbus 330. I just like knowing that kind of stuff. According to my watch, I got about 4 hours of sleep on the leg to Copenhagen. It certainly helped that we paid for the pods so we could lie flat.
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| I'm not at all delighted about the seating |
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| Control panel for the seats |
Even though we got to Denmark early in the morning and we were the only flight in at that time, it took us over an hour to clear customs. They had 3 kiosks open and one was dedicated to EU passengers. The flight originated in Canada and the majority of us weren’t in that category so the guy at that one twiddled his thumbs while the other two were very busy.
After we cleared customs, we made our way to the spot where we could buy train tickets.There was a lovely lady who spoke English and helped us figure out which ticket we needed, where to change trains, and which stop was only a few blocks from our hotel. Kudos to the Europeans for making it easy for travellers to find their way around.
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| A view of the tracks |
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| Station where we changed trains |
The rest of the day is a bit of a blur and I don’t remember if we got checked in early or if we had to wait. I managed to stay awake until almost 9 pm local time before crashing. My journal tells me we bought lunch at a grocery store and went to a little pizza place for supper.
Our hotel was quite the weird shape, narrow at the bottom and wider at the top. It was in a residential area and there was a lot of construction going on around it. I spent part of the afternoon watching a crane move great concrete slab wall and floor sections into place.
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| Our weirdly shaped hotel |
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| A view from the top floor |
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| Lots of construction in the area |
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| Out hotel from down the street |
