Estonia is our first Baltic state and marks the beginning of the westward journey home. It is one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe and so we found an abundance of woods to camp in and rarely saw anyone in the evening. I found my first and so far only waterfall of the holiday in Estonia. I’ve found…
The Finnish section of the holiday was short, only spending four nights in the country. We cycled from Turku to Helsinki along the King’s Road, a section of the old major postal route that linked up Norway to Russia in the 14th century. It was 150 miles of mostly forest and wilderness. We were close to the sea but rarely…
A constant thought during the first half of the tour was whether we should go further north in Sweden and up around the Bothnian Sea or cut across to Finland. In Stockholm we decided that we had had enough of endless woods and that sailing through the Archipelago Sea would be more interesting. It consists of 20,000 islands, almost all…
Before launching into the cycle tour from Gotland in my previous post up past Stockholm to the port of Kapellskär I wanted to give you a quick overview of the the tour so far. We left Cornwall on the 20th May, and spent 32 days cycling in Ireland. We then cut across the UK to Rotterdam in the Netherlands and…
Since leaving jolly old England we’ve been cycling for 24 days and roughly done 1300 miles. So it isn’t that surprising that we decided a holiday was in order. Originally I was keen on going to the island of Öland but we noticed on the map that we could take a ferry to Gotland and then another one back further…
I’ve been looking forward to cycling through the Scandinavian countries since we planned the tour. Sweden and Finland have a ‘everyman’s right’ to camp where you like (within reason). So whilst food is more expensive, as long as we can find somewhere to wild camp, we don’t have to spend any money on campsites. My third bicycle touring top tip…
Our hosts from the previous night kindly offered us a lift up to Copenhagen, so following Touring Tip 2, we gladly accepted the offer and got to Copenhagen mid morning. They also introduced us to another friend who lives in an apartment in the city. He was happy to host us that night so we spent the remainder of the…
Denmark is the first country we’ve cycled on the clockwise route that properly borders the Baltic and so nearly a week after leaving Hull we have reached the beginning of the planned Baltic route (or Eurovelo 10). The route is goes up through Denmark and then along the coasts of Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Germany. In Germany we will…
From the Netherlands we continued north, three days cycling brought us to Hamburg where we decided to spend an extra day looking around the city. This was partly due to a day of rain being forcast and partly because we had heard the city was beautiful. The town hall in particular was stunning. We bought a day travel ticket for…
Before we start the Baltic Sea route proper we need to get to it. This amounted to catching a ferry from Hull to Hook of Holland and cycling for miles along the flat cycle paths through the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. The ferry took 12 hours overnight and so a cabin in compulsory. We thought the outside looked more like…