Countries 4, 5, and 6: Norway, Sweden and Finland

As Mike mentioned in his blog we had a great time in Copenhagen. From Denmark we drove to Oslo where we really enjoyed ourselves. We did a walking tour where we saw all of the sites, but the highlight was a kayak tour of the harbor. We all really enjoyed that.

Mike and Alex say that Olso is their favorite city so far. Alex is thinking he might want to be an exchange student in high school and we've been rating the various cities based on various criteria.

If you ever drive in Oslo, keep in mind that they have put most of the roads under the city. This makes the city beautiful, but GPS doesn't work, so you have to know the directions of your route and follow them yourself instead of relying on GPS (imagine that!). It took us a little while to figure that out.

Next we went to Stockholm. We only had a day in Stockholm since we are planning to go back later in the year to visit one of Alex's friends from school who lives there (hi, Wilmer!). We did a super interesting walking tour of the old town and then really enjoyed the Vasa museum (a huge ship that was built in 1628 and sailed for a total of 10 minutes before sinking). The museum is amazing, though, since they were able to salvage the ship hundreds of years later and it is now almost fully intact.

We also enjoyed some Swedish meatballs and reindeer steak. And Alex got a kick out of how they served the shrimp with the heads still on them!

From Sweden to Finland we took an overnight ferry. It was basically just a Viking cruise for one night. Super fun to get to spend a night on a boat and wake up in a new country with our car having come along for the ride.

We spent yesterday exploring Helsinki. We had lunch in the harbor market - yummy salmon and produce. Then we went to the Suomenlinna fortress (which was built by the Swedes and occupied for a long time by the Russians). They had a dry dock there where they repair boats that was an engineering marvel, especially for its time. Below you can see Helsinki off in the distance from the island of Suomenlinna.

It's interesting to think about what it would be like to live in a country where all of the countries around you (Sweden, Russia, ...) would like to have your land and resources. Definitely a different perspective from the US.

Tomorrow we take the same ferry to Estonia. Except this time it's just for a couple of hours.

Hopefully everyone is having a great summer!