> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.kevinmeyer.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Three weeks in Finland, Estonia, Sweden, and Denmark, and the ranking I got wrong - URL: https://www.kevinmeyer.com/three-weeks-in-finland-estonia-sweden-and-denmark-and-the-ranking-i-got-wrong/ - Published: 2026-08-25T09:58:11.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-25T10:04:57.000Z - Author: Kevin Meyer ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c3/9a/c39a9c8a-1d82-46be-8e4f-ed7e6cd347f4/content/images/2026/08/nyhavn-1.jpeg) The rain in Copenhagen came down hard one afternoon but we still walked a couple miles to the iconic Little Mermaid statue. Phones out. A woman rode past with a small child in a cargo bike, unhurried, dressed for an ordinary Sunday. Then a few dozen joggers. Then a couple hundred more bicycles. We're Californians. Rain is an event. Nobody around us adjusted anything at all. The itinerary held up well over three weeks, which I'll get to, but the thing I keep turning over is how much I carried into these four countries that had nothing to do with them. I'd ranked these cities in my head before we ever left, and I hadn't earned the ranking. August was the right month. Warm without the punishing heat that had settled over southern Europe, and water still warm enough to swim in. What we hadn't accounted for was that everyone else knew it too. Finns, Estonians, Swedes, and Danes get roughly four months of dependable warmth, and by mid-August they're spending it hard. Parks full at 9pm. Swimming platforms crowded. The cities we walked through were being used by the people who live in them, which is a different experience from walking through one that's mostly hosting visitors. We had two days of rain across the whole trip, most of it in Denmark. We had originally thought of including Norway on this trip, but after considerably research we realized that country really deserved a trip on it's own in order to properly experience Oslo, Bergen and the fjords, and the Lofoten Islands in the far north. ## Helsinki, and the road signs to St. Petersburg We lean toward the luxury end on hotels, but still the first thing we do in a new city is get on the cheap Hop On Hop Off bus. We don't hop off. We ride the full loop, which costs almost nothing and hands us a working map of how the place is put together before we start walking. In Helsinki it also gave us something to accomplish on day one while the jet lag did its work. Stockholm runs a water loop alongside the land loop and they're both worth it. Copenhagen has three, including a colorful tour that swings past Christiania and a loop built around the Carlsberg brewery. Tallinn is the exception, since the old town is compact and largely pedestrian. Helsinki is the most mellow of the four capitals, which makes it the right place to start. The only stretch that gets hectic is around the Esplanade, and even that's mild. We stayed at the Waldorf Astoria rather than the Bank hotel, and after walking the Esplanade a few times I was glad we did. We took the half day out to Porvoo, which is smaller than I'd pictured. It's scenic and worth the morning. What stayed with me was on the road out: signs to St. Petersburg. The distance is short. Not long ago you could drive it on a whim, and now there's a wide buffer at the border that you aren't crossing casually, and no, you can't drive up for a look. Standing in a quiet Finnish town reading a highway sign for a Russian city puts the last few years in a register that reading about them doesn't. Löyly, the harbor sauna out on Hernesaari, is worth the trip across town. Book it well in advance, since you reserve a two hour block and the slots go. And take the dip in the Baltic. You heat up, get in the cold water, then repeat, and it's the second cycle when the whole thing stops being an endurance test and starts making sense. The day trip to Tallinn was one of our favorites. The Tallink ferry runs from West Terminal 2, and business class costs a few dollars more than standard. Take it. Priority boarding and disembarkation puts you ahead of a very large crowd, which matters most on the Tallinn end where the taxi queue forms fast. We walked the old town tour in reverse from how it was laid out, because the taxi drivers prefer a particular drop point and there's no sense fighting it. The old town is compact and in better repair than I'd expected. ## Stockholm, which won Stockholm was our favorite city on the trip, and it wasn't close. We stayed at the Lydmar, a small hotel next door to the Grand, right on the water. Guests get access to the Grand's fitness room, which is nicer than you'd expect from a hotel that size. More useful: the ferries leave from directly out front. We walked a tremendous amount here. Fourteen islands connected by bridges and short boat rides means the city rewards walking in a way a compact single-center city doesn't, and the connections are easy enough that you stop thinking about them. [Kulturfestivalen](https://kulturfestivalen.stockholm.se/en/?ref=kevinmeyer.com), Stockholm's annual culture festival, ran the 12th through the 16th and covered most of our stay. Free stages go up around the central squares and along the waterfront, mostly music, and the city had an energy that an ordinary week wouldn't have supplied. The cost is more people in the central areas, which is a fair trade. The Vasa Museum deserves its reputation, and the scale of the hull really doesn't come through in photographs. Fotografiska was excellent. And the ABBA Museum, which I want to be direct about: go, even if you're convinced you don't care about ABBA. It's well constructed and experiential in a way most music museums never manage, and I say that as someone who walked in unenthusiastic. Our other Stockholm highlight was the half day out to Vaxholm. An hour on the ferry through the inner archipelago, which doubles as the local commute, so you're watching people travel to and from home rather than riding a tour boat. We did the 4.3 mile loop hike around the island, through neighborhoods of summer houses set on granite. It reminded me of northern Michigan more than anywhere else we went. ## Copenhagen, and the walking We skipped the train from Stockholm. Five hours, a transfer in Malmö at rush hour, and Swedish countryside we'd already seen a fair amount of. We flew instead, an hour gate to gate, and I'd make the same call again. Copenhagen is a good walking city and the neighborhoods are where it pays off. Our first afternoon we walked to Nyhavn and back through the pedestrian shopping streets, which is the obvious move and it's fine for what it is. The better day was the long walk out to Christiania and then on to Reffen. Christiania has been cleaned up considerably from what it was, and it's interesting to walk through and see what survived the transition. Reffen, the container food market on the harbor, had more lunch options than we could work through. Vesterbro, the old red light district, is now a funky neighborhood of local shops and bars and worth an afternoon of its own. The Louisiana Museum is beautiful, the building winding down through old trees to a terrace above the Øresund with Sweden on the far shore. The collection ran more contemporary than our taste, which says more about us than about the museum. Go for the building and the sculpture garden. We stayed at the Marriott, which is comfortable and well located, and it's the one booking I'd change. After the Waldorf Astoria and the Lydmar, a chain business hotel felt like a missed opportunity. The room was fine. The city deserved better from us. ## The ranking I got wrong I expected Denmark to be the tidiest of the four, and I held that with some confidence before we left. I still can't reconstruct where it came from. Some accumulated impression of Danish design doing work it was never entitled to do, probably. Stockholm was the one that stood out. Cleanest, best groomed, with landscaping maintained to a standard that reads as deliberate policy rather than good luck. Tallinn and Helsinki followed close behind. Copenhagen carries more graffiti and more overgrown planting than I'd anticipated, though the proportion matters here: every one of these cities is cleaner and better kept than almost anywhere else I've been, and the spread among the four is narrow against that baseline. The direction of my error is what stayed with me, since the error itself was small. The other correction was bicycles. I knew Copenhagen was a cycling city. I hadn't understood what that means at street level. In Copenhagen you watch the crossing signal for the bicycles, because they're the faster and more numerous hazard and they arrive from angles a driver never would. The upside is that ordinary residential streets have wide separated lanes for walking and riding, which makes long distances on foot easy and safe. Stockholm and Copenhagen had the most bikes by a distance, and both cities are better to walk in for it. We'd sequence the trip the same way again, and it'd work about as well in reverse. Helsinki eases you in, Tallinn is a day of compressed history, Stockholm is the peak, and Copenhagen is where you stop walking. What I still don't have is a good answer for the joggers. They were out in the heaviest rain of our three weeks, and they were out in the same numbers on the clear mornings, and there was no evident calculation in either case. I've been home a week and I'm still building my day around a forecast. What are you carrying into a place that has nothing to do with the place?