After checking in, you have time to explore. Perhaps you wander into a local bakery and choose a sweet wienerbrød, its sugar rustling softly inside the paper bag. You clink glasses over drinks and dinner with the Travel Director and fellow travelers. As evening settles in, you walk down to Tivoli Gardens, wandering along glowing lamplit paths past the Chinese-style Pantomime Theater. Perhaps you will board the old wooden roller coaster or catch the sweet buttery scent of pastries wafting among the food stalls.
With your Local Specialist, you move through Copenhagen’s harbor streets and royal squares, pausing at the Little Mermaid, where sea air brushes your skin as Andersen’s bronze figure looks out across the water. You continue to Christiansborg Palace, the seat of the Danish Government, then pass Rosenborg Castle’s red-brick walls and copper-spired turrets before crossing Amalienborg’s octagonal palace courtyard. In Nyhavn, you pass painted townhouses that lean over moored boats as water knocks softly against the hulls. The afternoon is yours to shape, whether you linger in the city or choose today’s Optional Experience into the Danish countryside to visit the castles of North Zealand.
Traveling along Sweden’s west coast, you arrive in Gothenburg, where your Local Specialist leads you through a city of canals, quays and old fishing trade. As vessels bob in the harbor and gulls call above coils of nets, you hear how shipyards, fishing and seafood have long filled working days by the water. This evening, you head along Avenyn, Gothenburg’s broad boulevard, passing the Poseidon fountain, glittering theater lights and tall trees lining the pavements. Perhaps you will take a seat at a local seafood restaurant as evening settles and you hear fish sizzling on the grill.
You follow the shore of Lake Vättern towards Stockholm, watching fertile farmland spread beyond the window in fields of green and gold. At Grännaberget cafe, you sit down on, you take your time over a warm coffee and fresh flaky pastries that crumble between your fingers. This MAKE TRAVEL MATTER® Experience helps preserve Sweden’s cultural heritage through fika, a moment to stop, relax and enjoy the moment.
Through Gamla Stan’s narrow medieval lanes, you follow your Local Specialist towards Storkyrkan, the city’s medieval cathedral, with painted ceilings above and the St George and the Dragon sculpture inside. At City Hall, you pass into Gyllene salen, where flashes of gold dance across the gleaming marble floor and mosaic walls glow beneath glittering chandeliers. Then you move into the grand Blå hallen, where high red brick walls rise far above pale stone arches in a vast room used for the Nobel Prize banquets. In the afternoon, you might continue to the Vasa Museum, where you stand before a 17th-century warship raised from Stockholm harbor more than 300 years after it sank on its maiden voyage.
Arriving in Uppsala, seat of Scandinavia’s oldest university, you walk with Hans Odoo, a Local Specialist, into the Linnaeus Garden, Sweden’s first botanical garden. Crunching gravel paths lead you between 18th-century garden quarters, hedges of mock orange, barberry, willow and spruce. If the wild tulips are flowering, you may catch their fragrance as they unfold in front of you and Hans shares how the garden changed the way plants were studied. Later, you arrive in Falun, where timber houses painted Falun red line the old mining streets. At a local restaurant, you sit down to a farm-to-table dinner of fresh, locally sourced ingredients.
With your Travel Director, see the rim of the Great Pit and gaze down into the vast crater left by a mine collapse at Falun Copper Mine in 1687. From there, the road slips along Lake Siljan towards Mora, with broad water beside you and stories of the town’s 17th-century witch trials waiting on arrival. Sweden’s forested interior grows denser on the way to Sälen, where you stand at the starting point of Vasaloppet and picture skiers pushing into the cold, their poles striking a 90-kilometer route through pine and snow towards Mora. Across the Norwegian border, Hamar’s Vikingskipet curves like an upturned Viking ship, its Olympic ice once cut by the scrape of speed skates. You travel beside Lake Mjøsa, Norway’s largest lake, with water stretching towards Lillehammer and the mountain town’s 1994 Winter Olympics legacy.
Leaving Lillehammer, you travel northwest into Peer Gynt country, looking out across farm valleys before the road climbs into mountain country immortalized by Ibsen. In Lom, you pause before the dark timber of Lom Stave Church, one of Norway’s largest and oldest stave churches, and look up at the carved dragon heads along its roofline. The road bends on, and you follow its turns through the spray of roaring waterfalls, rushing rivers, ice fields, lakes and snow-capped peaks. In Geiranger, you arrive and look down to fjord water below, with steep mountains around you and the sound of falls in the distance.
After a Relaxed Start, you have time to wander through Geiranger at your own ease, with fjord water below, steep mountains around you and cool air carrying the scent of wet stone and greenery. Perhaps you will choose today’s Optional Experience along Troll’s Road, where 11 hairpin bends climb the mountainside and Stigfossen drops beside the route. At the viewpoint, you look down over each tight turn, with the thunder of water below and mountain air cold against your face.
You begin on the water, cruising along Geirangerfjord and watching the water darken beneath steep mountains and waterfalls threading down the rock. At Bøyabreen, you pause for a photo stop near a steep arm of Jostedalsbreen, where blue-white ice grips the mountainside above you. In Fjærland, your choice experience lets you choose between the Norwegian Glacier Museum, a MAKE TRAVEL MATTER® Experience where you can experiment with 1,000-year-old ice, or a walk through the village with a Local Specialist to hear about daily life between the fjord and the glacier. The road then follows the water to your historic fjord hotel in Leikanger, where dinner is served with fresh, locally sourced produce.
Across Sognefjord, Norway’s longest and deepest fjord, more than 200 kilometers of water stretch between steep mountain walls as you travel onward. On the Flåm Railway, you settle by the window as the train climbs through tunnels and steep terrain, waterfalls flashing past the glass. In Voss, you visit Finnegarden Farm and taste traditionally crafted juices and ciders, their crisp flavor shaped by glacial soil and a cool climate. You arrive in Bergen by the water, a former Hanseatic trading port where Bryggen’s wooden wharf buildings stand close along the harbor and you breathe in salt air as you walk the narrow lanes.
At Bergen’s harbor, you join your Local Specialist by the lively Fish Market, which has been part of city life since the 1200s. You pass fish laid on beds of crushed ice, berry baskets, leafy greens and colorful buckets of flowers, as the scent of fresh fruit cuts through the cool harbor air and vendors call across the stalls. At Håkon’s Hall, you step onto wide wooden floorboards and look up to a steep timber roof, with gray stone walls, arched windows and warm hanging lights above the medieval banqueting hall. The afternoon is yours to explore, perhaps visiting the Kode Museum before riding Fløibanen up Mount Fløyen, where the funicular climbs 320 meters above sea level as you look out across Bergen’s colorful rooftops and the deep blue water stretching out towards the horizon.
Leaving Bergen behind, you climb into Norway’s high country, watching the blue of the coast change to mountain lakes, pale stone and long sweeps of sky. On the Hardanger Plateau, the road reaches around 1,200 meters, where the breeze feels cool against your skin as you pass ski resorts and broad mountain country. Further along the route, the scenery turns greener, with spruce and birch forests lining the horizon and the clean scent of resin in the air as the coach hums towards Oslo.
Past the Royal Palace, you follow your Local Specialist to Akershus Castle’s 14th-century ramparts at the end of the headland, looking up to its spires and out across the harbor. In Frogner Park, you walk among Vigeland’s bronze, granite and wrought-iron figures, close enough to notice clenched hands, bowed shoulders and faces caught between tenderness and strain. Around the Opera House and Bjørvika, you follow the fjordside, passing white marble, glass façades and Barcode’s narrow high-rises as you hear waves tap along the quay. In the evening, you sit down at a local restaurant, wine cool in the glass, and toast the fellow travelers who have crossed fjords, high roads and harbor cities with you.
You'll say goodbye to your Travel Director and fellow travelers, as your Scandinavian journey comes to a close.
