Just over 6 weeks to go and the planning is nearly over! We began this nearly a year ago. First up was the rough itineray - where we would enter Scandinavia and leave Russia from? - We settled on starting in Copenhagen and ending up in Moscow. So then we booked our flights via "points" on Star-Alliance. Although we both had enough points for Business Class it proved difficult to arrange our return flights out of Moscow on the desired day, so we had to a) move our return home ahead by one day and b) accept that there was only one seat available in Business Class from Moscow to Frankfurt. FG being larger pulled rank here!
Then we were faced with more specific details of allocating sufficient days to each destination. Actually the impetus for this trip came when someone sent us a video-clip on U-Tube of the hike up Pulpit Rock near Stavanger in Norway, so that became a "must". Indeed Norway, although not a cheap country to tour, is getting the most time allocated to it - two weeks. Four days in Denmark, four in Sweden, two in Tallinn and Helsinki and eight days in Russia.
Just recently we got our Russian Visas - not cheap because we used a Visa Service Company to arrange both Russian and Vietnamese Visas (the latter for a bike tour in Nov 2010 - but that's a different blog) and we foresaw complications if we did it on our own - this way we had our passports back inside ten days (frugal doesn't always mean cheap in this blog - sometimes expedience overtakes cheap)
Next time I'll cover accommodation and internal transport.
