Our trip has finally arrived! Lincoln Zach and I are off to Scandinavia/Nordic countries for nearly 5 weeks! The school year has been miserable so I am more than excited for a much needed break.
Day 0-1 was mostly terrible travel. We were traveling for almost exactly 24 hours straight from when we left our house until we arrived in our Helsinki apartment. Terrible travel but that is part of the reason I love doing longer trips so that all the terrible travel is worth it!
My mom came to take us to the airport. She also supervised Lincoln for the morning while we did last minute gardening and packing.
Us and our gardens! Hopefully they aren't a complete disaster when we come back. We left for the airport around 12:30
Our first flight was to Chicago on Sun Country. We enjoyed some Starbucks drinks during the long wait. As usual MSP was great. We were at our gate within 30 min of arrival at the airport.
First flight we brought the car seat. That was a mistake...Lincoln just kept kicking the person in front of him. Otherwise the flight was just fine.
Chicago skyline
There are no pictures in Chicago because despite having nearly 3 hours of transfer time we barely made our flight. That airport is a mess, no terminal transfer train, unhelpful people and signs and just an overall horrible experience. Thankfully we did make our flight though and I even had time to buy a $50 dinner from Starbucks next to our gate. Lincoln insisted on being strapped in with all his bedtime friends whenever the seatbelt sign was on.
The flight was about 8 hours to CDG. Nothing to bad. Lincoln did eventually sleep for about 5 hours. I got 4 hours of sleep and Zach said something like 2 hours (he never sleeps on planes). Here is the view of the french countryside as we arrived.
CDG is just a horrible airport! We had to walk well over a mile to get to the transfer point. Then American never gave us our second set of tickets and all the ticket printers were broken. We made it through transfer security with the airline email and pleading. Then we still had to move to another terminal. When we got there we could not figure out how to actually get to our gate so we first had lunch. It was a pretty good baguette sandwich.
After much more disaster and 2 more layers of security we made it over to the international transfer side of our terminal. We still had about 2 hours (out of 5 total hours transfer time) so Lincoln and Zach took a nap on the floor. Next up was another 3 hour flight this time on FinAir. Pretty uneventful except they don't even serve pretzels....just one beverage service. We landed in Helsinki about 15 min late at 7:15.
You could tell we were in a Nordic country. This airport was so nice and well layed out. Everything had signs and we had no problems. We had a nice 25 min taxi ride into the city with a driver from Somalia. He knew our congresswomans name and lots about Minnesota. Very nice guy. He even took me to the place to get our keys for the apartment for free. We were at our apartment by 8 pm so it was a very quick transition and finally a good experience at the end of a lot of bad travel
We were beyond exhausted so when Zach found a decent pizza place across the street from our apartment I said fine.
They had ok beer, good salad and good pizza plus fast service so it was a perfect solution
I think it was called Soprano's pizza, here is Lincoln not wanting to leave.
Next we took a very short walk around our apartment. We walked to the harbor and it was beautiful!
Tired traveller selfie!
Just a hint of the great architecture of the city.
Our apartment. Kinda a cross between a studio and a 1 bedroom apartment
Still plenty bright out at 10 pm. Shortly after this we all collapsed for the night!
So like I said terrible travel day, mostly due to poor airport setup and signs. But things are looking up if our short night in Helsinki is any indication. Day 2 is a trip to Tallinn!
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