Reset Your Balance with This Two-Week Saaremaa Itinerary

Between Italians with Ferragosto (August vacation, when major cities look abandoned like it’s 28 Days Later), statutory five-week Swedish holidays, and Parisiens abandoning Paris for August, Europeans know how to strike a real work-life balance. Maybe we don’t yet have that in North America, but here’s how to compress that into a wonderful two-week vacation on the Estonian island of Saaremaa.

Instead of spending your two-week summer holiday frantically criss-crossing Estonia, why not focus on a specific region? For instance, the island of Saaremaa.

If you exclude the Danish straits, Saaremaa is the second-largest island (2,700 km2) in the Baltic Sea. Only Gotland is bigger (for readers of this newspaper, Gotland may be a familiar name, as it’s the Swedish island to which many of our parents or grandparents fled after leaving Estonia by boat in 1944).