Friday 15th May 2026 saw us waking up at the Crowne Plaza at Heathrow’s Terminal 4, ready to start a trip we had been looking forward to since we first started planning it 18 months earlier. For the next 16 days we would be exploring some of the countries that make up the Nordics, with stays in Finland, Norward and Sweden all in the plan. But before we could start exploring these amazing countries, we first had to head in that direction, and what better way to start a trip of this magnitude than with a flight with Finnair in Business Class from Heathrow to Helsinki onboard one of their flagship Airbus A350s.

Having had an interesting and yet chilled day exploring Gothenburg, I was back at the airport nice and early ready to catch my flight back to the UK. As with the flight out, I’d be flying home with Ryanair onboard one of their Boeing 737-800s on one of the last flights of the day to depart the Swedish airport. But before we got to the flying, I needed to make my way through the airport formalities and hopefully not get waylaid by the now infamous EES border controls.

With my trip to Barcelona and Andorra having been a month earlier, and our big trip to the Nordics not for another few weeks, I decided that April was the perfect time for squeeze in an extreme day trip. Having trawled Skyscanner for the best combination of price and flight times, I had settled on a destination that would help build up my excitement for our upcoming Nordics trip. And so, early on a Wednesday morning in April, I was doing my semi-regular drive down the M11 towards Stansted, ready to catch a Ryanair flight to Gothenburg, Sweden.