We’ve spent the last 2 months or so planning, but now we’re finally ready to go on vacation. Actually the planning process was much longer than that! Initially, the idea was to go to Scandinavia – Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, which was supposed to happen in 2010. But we had our house move which messed up our summer schedule and we didn’t go anywhere last summer.

So this year, we had the same basic framework in mind. We would take Icelandair, which would give us a free stopover in Reykjavik and then proceed to the Norway. From there, we would head East to Helsinki. Somewhere in the middle, we realized that St Petersburg (SPB) is on the same latitude as Helsinki so we might as well go there as well!

This year, since we had time and it looks like the volcano is in our favor, we started planning and booked our YYZ -> KEF -> BGO and HEL -> YYZ flights. As we started working out the itinerary, we realized that we were going for two long and Scandinavia IS expensive (as everyone says). That was one headache. The second headache was to get into Russia, you needed to get a visa. The visa was an extra headache because aside from getting photos and the visa itself, you had to get an official letter from where you’re staying, and a document detailing your health insurance. All of that for one or two days in SPB!

So we re-worked our schedule and itinerary a great deal before we finally found a plan that worked for us – more on that later! For now, we are flying to Iceland for a couple of days.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: summervacation11, travelling