Explore the Baltic

Fourteen nights around the Baltic through seven countries, starting and finishing in Berlin, with three UNESCO capitals and two ferries. Own bike or a hired BMW.

Berlin opens it with the welcome dinner, then the route runs east into Poland and up to Gizycko in the Masurian lakes, where more than a hundred lakes are linked by canals and the region is known as the land of a thousand of them.

The Baltic states follow. Vilnius is first, called the Jerusalem of the North for the Jewish scholarship that flourished there before the war, with a museum of the occupations inside a former KGB building. Riga comes next, which has the largest concentration of art nouveau architecture of any city in Europe and a UNESCO listed centre, then Tallinn, whose medieval old town is among the best preserved anywhere, with its walls and towers largely intact.

The Gulf of Finland is crossed to Helsinki for the market square and the harbour, then an overnight ferry to Stockholm and a free day there for the Royal Palace, the Skansen open-air museum or the view from the Kaknas tower. The route then runs south through Sweden and over the Oresund Bridge into Denmark, which carries the road five miles across the strait before diving into a tunnel, with the return to Berlin after it. Hotels, breakfasts, dinners as listed, the ferries, maps and GPS routes are included, with fuel and other meals separate. The price is quoted per person. Seven countries in fourteen nights reads like a dash, but the Baltic is a small sea and the roads around it are quiet, flat and fast, so the daily distances never bite.