Route
The origins of this holiday started over a year ago with wanting to go to 3 places:
                Crete and Santorini
                Romania (a great 2 week circuit – Bucharest, Brasov, Transfagarasan Highway, including the castles of Peles, Bran, Rasnov, Poinari)
                Helsinki to visit a long internet friend.
Then I thought I’d save on air travel by doing all of them in 1 trip instead of flying from London to each of them individually, which made a nice South to North line. Then I found that the Romania circuit didn’t fit in to the South-North route, but the Iron Gates of the Danube and Hunedoara castle in Romania did fit, plus those 2 places didn’t fit into the Romania circuit; plus I didn’t have enough time in this larger holiday to spend 2 weeks in Romania, so that will be done another year. By then I’d already been to Helsinki and I had the idea of extending the trip to the North Cape of Norway, making it into my craziest trip yet – the most southerly point of Europe to the most northerly.
I spent a lot of time researching where to go in the former Yugoslavia, mostly some stunning places in Croatia, but unfortunately when I found that 4 weeks was the longest single holiday that work would let me have, I saw there wasn’t enough time for Croatia either. So again, Croatia/Slovenia will be another holiday - the train along the river that borders Bosnia looks great, it’s “now cleared of mines for at least 15 metres either side of the track”!

Highlights
This was a great holiday, one that I will remember for a long time. The logistics were the most complicated I’d ever undertaken. I saw some amazing places: the lightening storm at Belogradchic was brilliant; Samaria Gorge in Crete was a fantastic hike; Norway was beautiful and my 6 days of permanent/midnight sun in the arctic circle was weird.

Reaching Nordkapp from so far away felt quite an achievement when I got there. It did get pretty remote up there. In World War II, my great uncle climbed up the 300m cliff in the dark with explosives to destroy a German radar station that was tracking the allied convoys to Murmansk in Russia!

Travel planning
As much travel as possible would be done by train. I had thought I might be possible to “wing it” all the way from Greece to Norway, choosing hotels along the way as I got there. But as I was relying on public transport rather than the freedom of a car, and I didn’t have much spare journey time, I’d have to book every train, plane and hotel in advance, otherwise I’d get to a station and find I’d just missed a train and then have to waste hours waiting for the next one. The more time you spend planning a holiday, the less time you waste on logistics and mistakes while on the holiday, resulting in more holiday time seeing the good sights. I booked my start (London to Santorini) and end flights (Tromso to London) months in advance and then had to book the route in between in the next few months. Researching the exact route and bookings took a long time and I was doing it right up until the morning that I flew to Santorini. Most of it was booked in advance:
   2 start and end flights.
   2 more major flights
   2 minor flights in northern Norway
   3 boats
   12 trains
   3 coaches
   15 hotels
   a few taxis in Romania
   and researched many more alternatives that were not as good.
   various day trips

As the start date got nearer with still a lot to do, I did feel I’d bitten off more than I could chew. But once I was on the move it was great to have a good plan: here is the Itinerary of all my bookings.

Travel Companions
My brother Alan for the week in Santorini and Crete. The start date of the trip was determined by when his conference in Santorini started. (How they managed to get Santorini as a conference venue I don’t know, but no one complained!)
Paul from my previous job joined me for 10days – Sofia in Bulgaria to Warsaw in Poland. He and his partner Sarah also looked after my house while I was away.

Other Notes
I traveled light – managing with a rucksack small enough to go as cabin baggage on flights – quicker and I didn’t want to risk losing my luggage in the airlines baggage systems, especially at the start of the holiday. I had 2 changes of clothes plus a variety of different tops/layers for different weather; it worked fine and my trousers with detachable lower leg were very handy. My bumbag/belt with camera pouch, water bottle/pouch and cagoul accompanied me everywhere; when the holiday ended I felt weird without it and kept reaching for my camera.

As the journey covered such a large range of latitudes I knew the climate would vary greatly in the trip. I definitely wouldn’t want to go to Greece in June as I really can’t take the heat, I’d rather go in December, but then Nordkapp would be an impossible minus 40Centigrade and under several metres of snow. So June it was, this also enabled me to use holiday allowance off work from 2 years as my company’s year runs 1^st July to June 30^th. Eventually I went 8^th June to 6^th July, as that tied up with Alan's conference in Santorini.

What next for a holiday?
When I was planning this trip, instead of going up through Sweden, instead, I nearly went up the (west) coast of Norway, via a place called Hell (near Trondheim). 
This has given me a brilliantly bizarre new idea - a holiday going to all the places in the world called Hell! : Hell in Norway, Hell in Holland, Hell in Michigan USA and Hell in the Cayman Islands.
There are also lots of places called Hell in Switzerland, but these are actually individual house names as Hell translates as "light" - a photo outside each one could be amusing.

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