Thursday 27 February 2014

Even more changes of plans

As you might noticed the title of the blog has been changed to Cycling in Scandinavia / Baltic states.
Ofcourse this has a reason. Recently I got an email from a Belgium guy called Kurt. I met him and Kurt and I were going to cycle together trough Denmark where Kurt continued in Skagen towards French. So we came to a great idea to go trough Sweden en Finland and go down to Poland because in Poland there is a train that heads back to Holland.
So Kurt and I made a new route and this is it.

The route

I am going quickly trough the plan country by country

Denmark

So the plan as it was stays the same in Denmark, we start and meet up in Copenhagen and then drive about 1000 Km's up towards Skagen. Then we go a bit south again towards Frederikshavn and then take the boat towards Sweden.

Sweden

So in Sweden we have two options we can go up north wich gives us in total an extra 1000 Km's or stick to the south. Most people say the northern of Sweden is more open and less people. Also they say that the northern part of Finland is more pretty so that is more easly for us to start north in Finland so we do not have to make a loop.
So we decide of we stick south or head up north on the way towards Sweden.
The northern route is 1265 Km. And if we stay south it's 646 Km.

Finland

When we enter Finland we can enter it at two points. Or the northern point or south this makes a huge difrends about or time in Finland. If we come in in the south we just have to travel 264 Km. to get to the harbor and cross over to Estonia entering the Baltic States.
If we come in from the north we have to travel 678 Km to reach the same harbour to cross over.

Baltic States

Crossing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania we here join the longest part of our trip covering just over 1400 Km.
We staying close the Rusian border not because it's Rusia but because there are less tourist at the western part of these countries so we see more ''untouched'' ground.

Rusia

As most people don't know there is actually a little piece of Rusia inbetween Lithuania and Poland. Wich we are going to check out. There are just 3 roads were you can enter it so we take the East border and leave Rusia at the south west. As you can see on the picture we didn't plan our route there, we are going to improvise because we have almost no data about roads in Rusia, this way we can't make an ideal cycling route. Also a funny think about this little part of Rusia is that the timezone is GMT+3 where the rest is +2.