It’s time! I’ve been training for the Stockholm marathon off-and-on for the past 3 months, and it’s hard to believe the big weekend is finally here.
I chose Stockholm for no other reason than that the date, June 4, was convenient to my training schedule. The fact that I’ve always wanted to see more of Scandinavia after visiting Copenhagen was just icing on the cake.
Instead of heading straight to Stockholm, I decided to fly to London first. Given Skyteam’s footprint in Europe, it was a lot easier to find cheap SkyMiles awards to major partner hubs in London, Amsterdam, and Paris, and I was able to find a reasonably-priced economy ticket to LHR on Virgin Atlantic for 30,000 SkyMiles and $5 in taxes.
I also figured it’d be pretty easy to find flights out of London on RyanAir. Sure enough, I found a flight out to Gothenburg Sweden the next day for about $25.
From there, I’m planning to take a 3-hour train across Sweden to arrive at Stockholm just before race day. And to get back home, I snagged a relatively inexpensive one-way flight on Norwegian for about $220. Interestingly, the flight was about $50 cheaper when booking through the native Swedish version of the site rather than the English version. There’s nothing quite like booking flights in a language you don’t understand at all, but context clues and Google translate go a long way.
Since I needed plenty of rest leading up to the marathon, I’m staying in hotels more often than I normally do on trips overseas. This will probably give me plenty of material for new hotel reviews, and I’ll update various segments of my trip here:
Introduction: Race to finish in Stockholm
Review: Wingtips Lounge New York JFK
Review: Hilton London Paddington
10 things to know before flying RyanAir
Review: Escape Lounge London Stansted
Review: Malmö Aviation + Menzies Business Lounges Gothenburg
Review: Hotel Quality Globe Stockholm
Review: Hilton Stockholm Slussen
Review: Menzies Business Lounge Stockholm, Terminal 5
I’ll be tweeting on the ground too, so feel free to follow me on Twitter for my latest misadventures. Off we go!