Last year we took our first DIY self-guided vacation for the family. We took an extended vacation starting with a week in Iceland, followed by a nine-day cruise of the Baltic Sea and then finishing with a week in Norway.  My journaling app (Journey) recently started sending me flashbacks of my trip, and it has been great reliving the experiences! I thought it would be fun to share our experiences with all of you as well! So for the next few weeks, watch for a daily account of our trip, including places we stayed, what we ate, things we saw, etc. It is always fun to revisit these adventures, so please follow along and see how much fun a DIY self-guided vacation can be.  I hope you enjoy them as much as we did!

Our Itinerary

Our DIY self-guided vacation was from June 26th to July 19th (23 days), and we visited eight countries. Below is a breakdown of the trip showing the locations we visited and the time spent there.

Dates	Locations Visited
June 26th to July 2nd	Iceland Day 1 – Departing for Iceland Day 2 – Driving in Iceland Day 3 – Touring Reykjavik Day 4 – Iceland’s Golden Circle Day 5 – Iceland’s South Coast Day 6 – Open Air Museum Day 7 – The Blue Lagoon
July 2nd to July 4th	Copenhagen
July 4th to July 13th	Baltic Cruise (Norwegian Cruise Lines)
Day 1	Copenhagen, Denmark
Day 2	Warnemunde, Germany
Day 3	Day at Sea
Day 4	Tallinn,Estonia
Day 5	St. Petersburg, Russia
Day 6	St. Petersburg, Russia
Day 7	Helsinki, Finland
Day 8	Stockholm, Sweden
Day 9	Day at Sea
Day 10	Copenhagen, Denmark
July 13th to July 14th	Overnight Cruise to Oslo
July 14th to July 16th	Oslo Norway
July 16th to July 17th	Flam Norway
July 17th to July 19th	Bergen Norway

DIY Self-Guided Vacation Planning

This trip was several trips stitched together. First, we wanted to do a Baltic cruise, and the one we chose was on Norwegian Cruise Lines, which was excellent! Since we were flying to Copenhagen we had a layover in Iceland and on Iceland Air, you can layover for up to a week at no additional charge, so we decided to do that as well since Iceland was on our places to go list.

Finally, we wanted to visit the fjords of Norway and during my research, I found a reference to a “Norway in a Nutshell tour“, which is a quick tour of the most scenic areas of Norway via train, boat and bus (as well as bikes – but more on that later). The itinerary ended up being the perfect mix of different countries and experiences, with the comfort of a cruise ship. An added bonus on the trip was almost every country we visited was in the running for the World Cup soccer championship so we got to experience all the hype in the different countries

Iceland

Iceland is such a great place to visit. It is an island that sits on top of the intersection of two tectonic plates, so there are lots of geothermal attractions to see. Also if you are a waterfall lover, you could spend weeks visiting and viewing spectacular waterfalls! We only scratched the surface in six days, choosing to spend our time in the capital of Reykjavik, doing the golden circle, and staying on the Southern coast. We plan to go back and do the ring road around the whole island in a future trip!

Baltic Cruise

It has been years since we had been on a cruise and honestly, I thought this would be a basic cruise ship taking us to the capital cities along the Baltic, but I was wrong. Norwegian Breakaway was our ship, and it was outstanding! There were lots of things to do and the weather was nice with two days at sea to relax. The cruise was a nice break during an almost month-long vacation that allowed us to really relax and see some great cities as well!

Norway in a Nutshell

While you can find Norway in a Nutshell full-service tours, it is not necessary because the itinerary is just a string of public transportation. You can go either direction (from Oslo to Bergen or vice versa) and you can do it in a day or stay over at various locations. We chose to take a train to from Oslo to Myrdal, then another train from Myrdal to Flam (that is supposed to be one of the top 10 scenic train rides in Europe). From there we took a fjord river cruise to Gudvangen, and finally a bus to Bergen. It was a beautiful trip and we overnighted in a small village right on the fjord called Undredal!

Spur of the moment bike ride!

As we approached Myrdal, we were all set to take the scenic train (green line) from Myrdal to Flam but at the last minute we found out we could check our luggage on the train and rent mountain bikes to ride the 20KM down to Flam instead. This ended up being quite an adventure as you will find out in future blog posts.

DIY Self-Guided Vacation Summary

In closing, this trip chocked full of great experiences, so many that you can’t cover them in one blog post. So stay tuned for updates over the coming days as I post up a daily summary to take you on the journey with us! I will also share details of the cost of the trip and do a comparison with full-service tours to compare the pros and cons of both.