Month: October 2015

Time for the long journey home. We awoke very early in order to catch a taxi to the airport. Our first flight was from Helsinki to Stockholm. Here are a couple of shots from the air.

We had kind of a long wait in Stockholm but everyone kept busy.

The next leg was Stockholm to Chicago, which was fine. We were pleased to be sharing the plane with a couple of Special Olympics teams who were flying to Los Angeles for competition. (It was a fun coincidence, especially given that several of our L.A. friends attended some of the games as spectators.)

On the final flight, from Chicago to San Francisco, I sat scrunched between two passengers, one row in front of all three boys. It was fine, but not the most comfortable I’ve ever been. Bruce sat across the aisle from a mom traveling with a baby and a toddler. The baby, who had just turned one, was not at all happy to be stuck on that flight and was a bit fussy. Luckily, Bruce (the baby whisperer) jumped in to help. He held the little guy for a while and kept him busy ripping up a magazine, a game our boys loved when they were that age. Tearing and scrunching paper never gets old.

By the time we landed in San Francisco, we’d been going for 24 hours and we were so tired! We collected our luggage and called an Uber to pick us up. (That worked extremely well!) Within five minutes both boys were asleep.

Bruce and I were not far behind in that respect. It was probably the quietest ride our driver had ever had.

We slept well finally back in our own beds. In the morning, we set out a spread that was as close to the ones we had at Jokke and Merja’s as we could manage. We love that German honey!

For our final day of the trip we decided to throw in one more country and go to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. We’d heard it was a not-to-miss destination if you’re that close, but we were worried about the long ferry ride (about an hour and forty minutes). I don’t do so well on boats, and Finn had had some pretty rough motion sickness this trip. But we decided to go for it. You can tell from this shot of Finn right after we got off the boat that it didn’t go smoothly.

Thankfully, once we were off the boat we both recovered fairly quickly. After exiting the ferry, we were immediately at this place called Linnahall. We hadn’t read anything about it ahead of time, but it seemed like a very strange, very large, Soviet-era venue of some sort.

We later read that it was originally built for the 1980 Summer Olympics, and its first name was the V.I. Lenin Palace of Culture and Sport. It has obviously fallen into a bit of disrepair.

After that interesting little time warp, we walked into Old Town Tallinn, which is even more of a time warp. But a gorgeous and charming one.

After lunch, we walked to a medieval wall.

And then, just to totally switch gears, we went to a store that sold marzipan and had a marzipan gallery.

It was another instance of creepy/cool.

Next we went to what we thought was a hands-on science museum. It was … mostly. There were some great exhibits that we really enjoyed, but there were also a few that were clearly propaganda for the energy company that paid for the museum. It was pretty comical. Here are some photos from the parts we liked.

That was our last stop before heading back to the ferry for the ride home. We were all a little nervous about how bumpy it might be, but Finn managed a smile anyway.

As it turned out, the ride back was much smoother and a bit faster, and we all arrived back in Helsinki in good shape. We stopped at the market square (Kauppatori) for a dinner of delicious salmon and potatoes.

We walked back to our hotel but stopped to see this fountain …

… and for ice cream along the way.

The boys thought it was hysterical that a bird was on the top of this statue’s head.

Finally, we made it back to the hotel and got packed up to go home the next day. It was a pretty great last day in Europe!

We had been told by all of our Finnish and German hosts that we had to make sure to go to Suomenlinna, a sea fortress a ferry ride away from Helsinki. They said the kids would love it and that it is a great way to spend a day. They were right! Before we start though, here are a few more pictures of beautiful Helsinki; I took these on our walk to the ferry stop.

The ferry ride is only 15 minutes long …

but it was a little windy.

Here are a couple of pictures from the boat. It was a gorgeous day.

Once we got to the island, we went to the tourist information place and then started walking toward the Toy Museum as our first destination.

The Toy Museum was both cool and creepy. Let’s get the creepy out of the way first …

The stuff of nightmares, really. But there were some very cool displays, too. Moomins:

Robots:

And a giant bear:

After our Toy Museum visit, we walked around and visited other parts of the island.

We stopped to see a Finnish submarine they had on display.

Then we moved along. Finn did the navigating.

We spent a while checking out this cannon.

And hiding out in all the little spaces we found.

It was starting to get pretty cold and a bit rainy but we soldiered on. The boys had made up a very elaborate game that they were invading the island.

We took some pictures on the rocks.

Finally I convinced them that we should go (because I was freezing). We walked back to the ferry stop and took the quick ride back to Helsinki. When we got there we walked over to the Russian Orthodox cathedral.

There was a small crowd of people and it turned out they were playing the bells for a special occasion, something that was, apparently, very rare. We really lucked out!

For dinner we took the city tram to a restaurant for traditional Finnish food. The boys and I had meatballs while Bruce had reindeer. We’re pretty sure Santa Claus will not be bringing Bruce anything this year.

This was our day to explore Helsinki. But first, breakfast at the hotel buffet. I think Ezra ate six croissants and a pile of bacon. Breakfast of champions.

There was some big gymnastics competition happening and we kept running into roaming teams of gymnasts from all over the world.

Our first stop on our self-guided walking tour was a drug store to get some medicine for Finn, who had a very itchy bite of some sort.

Here are some pictures from our sightseeing.

After a while we stopped at a park to give the boys a little respite.

We made our way to the “Rock Church” (Temppeliaukion Kirkko) which has a copper ceiling and was built into solid rock, making it a pretty unique.

After that we kept going, stopping at a candy store for sustenance, then continuing on with the sightseeing.

We dragged the kids to the Design Museum, which they ended up liking because there were a couple of iPads for them to play Angry Birds on, which is a Finnish-designed game.

I could’ve spent all day in there looking at all of the Finnish products.

I particularly enjoyed this display of Fiskars scissors at the reception desk.

We finally let the children roam free and found another park.

And then we walked along the waterfront to loop back to our hotel.

Bruce made a point of putting his hand in the Baltic Sea.

On the way back Ezra shook hands with the gold man.

Later we went out for pizza (giant pizzas!) and walked back to the hotel in the light rain. A successful day in Helsinki!

As an aside, the Finnish language is confounding and I snapped this picture of my favorite sign.

I think it was just a place to pay for parking from a machine, but I love how many letters there are!

This was our last day with the family before we headed to Helsinki for a few days. We had a quiet morning and I took a few more shots of our cottage surroundings.

Here’s our rental car and the outhouse!

Our outing on this day was the military museum. It was definitely a hit with the kids.

The highlight for me was seeing a real Enigma!

After the museum, we had lunch and went back at Arto and Tarja’s house. We met the two remaining Lumme siblings and watched a fun documentary on Finnish saunas. Finally, we were ready to hit the road, so we said our goodbyes to our wonderful hosts. It didn’t take long before Finn (and his Muumi) were asleep.

We successfully navigated our rental car return and found our hotel in Helsinki. We had dinner at a deli across the street and took baths before pulling the blackout curtains shut. We slept soundly until 8:30 the next morning, which was a miracle after many early mornings.

After a good night’s rest, we had a little breakfast in the cottage and Bruce took the boys in the row boat around the lake. First, here’s a picture of the little cottage.

And some boating shots.

It was a chilly but beautiful morning. I enjoyed some quiet time with my Kindle while they were out.

The plan for the day was to explore Tampere with Arto and Tarja’s son Toni as our guide. We started at Pyynikki Tower, which is touted to have the best donuts in Finland. Of course we had to try them! The quick disappearance of everyone’s donut, and Ezra’s face in this picture confirm the rumors. These are seriously good donuts.

Of course, next we climbed up the tower. Here are some shots of the views.

After coming back down from the tower, we split up the group and we walked with Toni over to an area with historic houses.

The boys played the ” coolest thing” contest while we waited for the rest of the group.

It turned out that the rest of the group had gotten a little lost, so we took a quick tour of the historic area without them. It was a very cute street — here are some of the sights.

Once we met up with everyone else, we went to the Moomin Museum, where I immediately started to take pictures and got in trouble. Oops!

This one they let me take.

After the museum we had lunch and then went to a different area of the city to meet Arto and Tarja’s other son, Tero. We had coffee and dessert and the kids took a horse and buggy ride with Arto.

We walked around the city for a while, seeing different sights. Here are some photos.

It was just starting to rain as we left Tampere. We stopped for groceries on the way home and had dinner at the cottage. We enjoyed another sauna and had a quiet night, still marveling at the view.

We started off our second full day in Finland with some berry-picking in the forest. We’d heard that the wild berries were phenomenal so we were very excited to have this outing. Our journey to the forest was about a three minute walk through Arto and Tarja’s neighborhood.

Here are some pictures from our foraging expedition.

We collected lots of tiny blueberries and strawberries.

While the berries didn’t knock our socks off, the beauty of the area and the novelty of berry-picking in the forest made for a great experience.

Bruce and I got out for a quick bike ride around Riihimäki.

And then we joined up with everyone else to head to Hämeenlinna. We picked up some lunch and had a picnic by a lake.

After lunch, the lucky ducks in the pond got a whole bunch of bread thrown to them.

From there we went to an elevated area where we had the chance to spend some time looking at this view.

Arto snapped a family picture for us.

Here’s one of all of us.

We did a lot of stair-climbing that day. First, down the stairs.

We hung out with the bear statue.

Then back up those stairs, and up some more stairs into the tower.

And back down.

After a quick coffee break, we moved on to the castle, which was really too extensive for me to photograph well but here are a few shots.

After that we went back to Arto and Tarja’s lake cottage, which would be our home for the next two nights. Bruce and Finn spent a while enjoying the sauna and the lake.

I had my first sauna, too, and Ezra also partook, but Finn and Bruce were the real diehards. After a while, we enjoyed a wonderful barbecue by the lake.

The landscape can’t be beat.

Here’s a slideshow of all of my photos.