Our Scandinavian Travels – Tallin, St. Petersburg, Helsinki & Stockholm

You guys, I had dinner at a real life PALACE…in Russia! What the heck is this life?! But for real, the main takeaway of the second half of our Scandinavian travels featuring We’re wrapping up the trip down memory lane of our Scandinavian travels with Tallin, St. Petersburg, Helsinki and Stockholm is that I love colorful buildings and that we ate at a palace. Oh, and that Stockholm designed every shop just for me and I threw all of my money at them.

Seriously, Jared will happily attest to all of these facts, haha. It’s really fun going back through all of the images to relive the memories. If you missed part one of our Princess Cruises trip, you can see that right here. Plus my failed DIY umbrella that I carried around seven countries anyway, and almost everything I bought on our trip right here.

Now for the rest of the trip details…

This group photo perfectly sums up Tallinn in a nutshell for me — it’s a little quirky, classic, and has lots of things to take pictures of, ha! I have almost an entire album in my phone dedicated to just doors of Tallinn.

If you ever visit, I highly recommend focusing your time on staying in Old Tallinn. It’s so charming that you’ll never want to leave, but small enough to relax while walking through all of the winding streets because there’s a little something for everyone. Even on Cinco de Mayo, which is why we actually look like this in the above photo, haha! Hey, Cassie and Cassandra!

As for a few stops to add to your list, we really loved these —

Doesn’t this pink building just look like an actual dollhouse come to life? I’m so happy we got to visit on such a pretty day!

Now this was Jared’s most highly anticipated portion of the trip — Russia. It’s been on his bucket list forever, and to be honest, we didn’t have high hopes that we’d ever make it there, especially these days! Now that said, a cruise visit is THE way to go.

I never felt unsafe or unnerved when in the group for the tours, and the Ultimate St. Petersburg excursion is a total must if you want to see as many museums, palaces, and churches as you can squeeze into two days.

Getting to have dinner and a private tour of this palace at sunset was worth the trip alone! If you can’t tell, we were plenty stoked.. and probably a little bit buzzed from Russian vodka.

What Russia lacks in a beautiful sounding language, it totally makes up for in architecture, I mean, it really out does itself when it comes to details, don’t you think?

I will say that I may not be the world’s best tourist all of the time. I tend to have the attention span of a child (hence a number of categories there are floating around S&C!), so there were quite a lot of the above antics in between stops! If you don’t follow along with Olivia and Cassie, you should be!

Also, can we talk about some casual baby girls nursery inspiration from this pink and green room? I kid, I kid, we haven’t won the lottery just yet.

When it came to visiting Helsinki, Finland, I was at the verge of my shopping heaven. Scandinavian design just cannot be beaten! That and the desserts, but you know.

I loved it so much, I wrote a looooong guide to Helsinki right here so I won’t get into too many details in this portion of the recap.

Now for Stockholm…oh Stockholm, you have my heart. It also didn’t hurt that it started magically snowing right when we arrived, and for a Texas girl that doesn’t see a lot of seasons, this was super exciting for me!

I also could’ve rented a giant shipping container for all of the things I wanted to buy while I was there. You know it’s the real deal when even your husband is saying “definitely buy that!” over and over, haha. Sara had told us about this one shop in particular, Lagerhaus, that was like a Dollar General for everything beautiful. I mean, I legit did a shopping cart dash in there.

We did try and venture out to a few places that weren’t just for filling the studio with more things, and Rosendals Tradgard was one of my favorites. Eden and Jen had both recommended it, and I could just go sit in this garden everyday.

Now is that a subway stop, or what?! I don’t know who’s idea it was to make the world’s coolest subway art in Stockholm, but they deserve a hug. This ended up being one of my favorite photos from the whole trip and was the perfect city for ending our cruise with a bang.

If you ever get the chance to take advantage of a Scandinavian cruise, definitely go for it! A big thanks to our fam at Princess Cruises for sponsoring us again this year, it’s our favorite annual hoorah!