The Wanderings of busman7

Even though I have been on the road almost a month & blown my budget into orbit! I only used the first segment of my One World RTW ticket on Sunday when I flew from LHR’s terminal 5 (the airport from HELL) to OSL,

Found Oslo extremely expensive so just stayed the night at Hotel Thon Astoria & broke out my Eurail Scandinavia Pass which gave me the pleasure of paying an extra $4.75 to reserve a seat to Stockholm. Due to the expense & the fact that Stockholm is a big city decided to grab the overnight train to Lulea, the end of the line. So another charge for the sleeper but only $23 so a cheap nights sleep for a change. However on the plus side the bus from Lulea to the border & with a change on to Kemi Finland is covered by the pass but another $8.15 for the seat reservation to Helsinki.

The flying tog shuttle train from the airport into Oslo at about $2.30 for the 20 min trip has to be the best deal going & the countryside passed through could very well be the Eastern Townships of Que minus the corn crops. Oslo seems not bad but homeless hanging out in the park next to the station. Can see why as the “cheap” hotel I stayed at a 10 min walk from the station would have been expensive at 1/2 the price.

One problem I am finding is the lack of secure internet sites at hotels so you can book ahead as don’t want to be giving out cc info on a site that’s not secure, which reminds me this one is secure so better look for a bed in Helsinki for the next couple nights.

If you have a map (no one ever told me how to link Google Earth maps to this site or would post one of my trip) I am taking the land route from Stockholm to Helsinki around the Gulf of Bothnia. Not that interesting scenery as mostly flat land with a few small farms mixed with bush (on the Swedish side anyway but what is surprising are the number & size of the towns & I sure wasn’t expecting to find 4 lane divided highways in Lapland!

Looks like the 5 day Scandinavia Rail Pass is coming in at about 10 Euro/ hr of travel but the trains boogey right along once they get out of town & wound up so one covers a lot of ground in an hour.

Daylight trip to Helsinki tomorrow couple days there & it’s off to St Petersburg!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 12:34 and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.