Over June and July 2025, we did a 7-week trip from Helsinki to Istanbul  travelling through the Baltic States and Eastern Europe. The trip took us from Finland to Estonia then to Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria and finishing in Turkiye. We hadn’t previously visited most of the countries on our proposed route, so there were going to be a lot of firsts. This post is the first of five describing the trip. Here is Part 1: Helsinki.