Resuming the Vagabond Adventure

After departing home and then a Boston visit with our daughter Molly (see her cool artwork at MollyRoseCreative.com) and her partner Ben, our Boston red-eye via Delta brought us to Stockholm's Arlanda International Airport. There we rebooted our journey.

The Arlands Express train zipped us silently through pine and birch forest, warehouses, farms and clusters of homes directly into the heart of Stockholm. Cost: $40 for both of us.

From there we hauled our bags for a mile through a cool, wet morning until we found the Hotel Birger Jarl, home for the next four days.

We had a plan ... We would explore Stockholm before taking the train to Oslo. After Oslo another train to Bergen, then a combination of ferries, buses and trains all the way to the Arctic Circle and Tromsø. If we could manage it, we wanted to make Svalbard, the northernmost human settlement in the world, then return back across Sweden by bus and train to northern Finland and Lapland before heading by a series of trains to Helsinki, the Balkan nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and then Poland. From there, we weren't quite sure.