Trip planning

We are very much looking forward to our trip to Scandinavia this summer. After several years of travelling to Europe, last year we opted for a North American road trip holiday to Montana and Wyoming. We had a great time but it didn't fulfill the wanderlust of going to Europe. This year I have changed my travel planning. I am relying totally on Air BnB to book our accommodation. In previous years I had used VRBO. Our bookings were always good through VRBO but I had troubles paying. Many of the places required me to send Bank Drafts or go through paypal which I found to be a hassle. Air BnB was much more convenient to book through their websites. I am unsure whether it was any cheaper. As always I was planning well in advance for the trip and I managed to have booked many of the places last September which provided me a very good selection of accommodations to pick. The other change this year with the trip is that I decided to travel via train for our first two legs of the trip from Copenhagen to Stockholm and from Stockholm to Oslo. These are very sizeable distances and would have taken several hours to have driven. I decided that it would have just been to exhausting and unpleasurable. On previous trips when I looked into train travel but it was considerably more expensive then car travel for a whole family. For the past couple of months I have been daily checking the Swedish Rail site for when the tickets would go on sale hoping that if I could buy the tickets on the first day they went on sale that maybe I could get a wee discount. When they did go on sale I was totally shocked by the cost. I have heard horror stories about the cost of travelling in Scandinavia but I never suspected the cost of the tickets. For our family to travel from Copenhagen to Stockholm it will cost us $77 CDN for all five of us. For our second trip from Stockholm to Oslo it will cost $144 CDN for the whole family again. How can this be so? Obviously the tickets must be highly subsidized by the state. After Oslo we will be renting a car for twelve days to allow us to travel to the very spectacular Sognefjord which one could get to by train but it would logistically be much more difficult. In previous years I have always been on the lookout for a nice monastery for two of my colleagues to retire to but unfortunately I have learned that Scandinavia did away with it's monasteries during the reformation. My apologies to Mark and Ross for letting you down on this. Last year Ross did get his genealogy tested through Ancestory.com and learned that he had Scandinavian blood so I will be happy to assist him with any genealogy research. I have included some of our photos from our trip last year in order to test out the site.Read more