The trick with getting a railpass is to add up the prices of individual tickets and figure out which of the different passes might result in the biggest savings. That is a big trick, and it wasn't easy to work it all out.
I have three definite one-way train trips:
- Copenhagen to Svendborg (where I get the ferry to Ærø)
- Svendborg to Kalmar
- Kalmar to Stockholm
You'd think I could just look up the cost of individual tickets on line, but no one published the cost of the Svendborg - Kalmar trip, so I had to guesstimate.
Then I had to account for the likely day trips, which are round trips:
- Copenhagen to Roskilde
- Stockholm to Uppsala
- Helsinki to Turku and Naantali
- Others?
I could get a six-day Scandinavia pass for $431, but could I save money by just getting a Denmark-Sweden pass and buying tickets for trips in Finland? A lot to figure out.
Yesterday I went up to Europe through the Back Door in Edmonds, and they helped me figure it out. I ended up buying a five-day Scandinavia pass for $378. The Copenhagen-Roskilde trip is cheaper than the $53 difference for the extra day, so I'll just buy a separate ticket for that.
With the railpass I should get a 50% discount on the Stockholm-Tallinn ferry. It actually comes to less than 50%, though, because there's a 15% early booking discount, and I can't get both. And when I apply the code to get the discount, it actually only seems to apply a 40% discount. It might be that the Eurail discount applies to the full fare, which is higher than the web fare.
Anyway, who knows, and really, who cares. I'm going to Europe in just a little over three months! I can't wait to start posting actual trip experiences instead of these boring (to everyone but me) explications of the ins and outs of planning my trip.