2022-06-25 Today is Meagan's birthday! Happy birthday to my niece, I hope you really had a great day today!
We are in Helsinki. I'm getting in a bad habit of staying up very late, and sleeping in a little later than normal at home. This morning I slept till 9:30 and we went to breakfast about 10:00 or 10:30. This is not good because most of the good breakfast is gone by then, specifically sit down breakfast, which we love the best. But we got breakfast and decided to see what it was like outside. We did not have an excursion planned for Helsinki. We'd already heard that it was a holiday here and most of the shops would be closed. So we decided to stick around the port. Kay was going to do the hop on hop off bus, but she got down there and found out it was 47 euros, well over $50 and not really worth it in our opinion. But there was a great souvenir place right outside the port, and I went down, and she and I shopped. I think she picked up a few things. I would have picked up even more but it was burning hot in there. It was a beautiful 70 to 75° and they had the heater on in there. I was burning up! I couldn't concentrate to stay in there and shop. They had some beautiful Christmas ornaments, and one of my family members collects them, or maybe two lol. I was too scared to try to get them home, as they were extremely thin glass, very finely crafted, and I didn't trust myself to get them home in one piece, for the price they were charging. I regretted it though, as soon as I got out of the shop, so maybe I'll find something similar somewhere else. One of the things I did see in the souvenir shops were tons and tons of little husky dogs :-) I took pictures of them and was so tickled! So this is where my Frank and little Rose originated! There were also all kinds of wolf stuff in the same vein of souvenir stuff, and I thought about Maggie. I miss all of my little babies!
Below you're going to find five pictures from a guy in our group named Brian. He did go into town, and he took some really nice pictures. I felt bad copying all of them, but I did copy five that were good and you'll see them below. Thankfully he has a watermark on them to identify them, so I don't feel like I'm stealing :-) but I did want you to see some pictures of the town. The rest of the pictures are just around the ship, outside of it. Lots of beautiful bay pictures, people having fun on the water, and birds! I loved watching the birds and made a game of trying to catch some of them in midair and midflight. I did fairly well on a couple of them. There's also a picture of the ferry that ran back and forth constantly from Helsinki Finland to Tallin, Estonia. As I understand it, Tallin is such a beautiful city, lots of fairy tale houses and whimsical architecture. Everyone that I talked to said it's a city that you have to visit at least once.
I finish out with the sunset. These two pictures were taken about 2 minutes apart, at 11:15 pm. Look at the difference in color - how it changes. This is no filter, this is actual color of the sky. If it does what it did this morning, the sun will be back out in full force by 2:30 am. As I write this, it's 12:26 am and you can still see fairly well outside. It's not dark and there's a red line running across the horizon. I can clearly see across the water onto the land on the other side. We're so far north it's happening again, as it did when we were in Norway. I don't know how the people stand it. It's clearly affected my sleep patterns. You can't believe you're supposed to go to sleep when it's still daylight outside.
At any rate, tomorrow is Visby, Sweden. I want to take a tour and I've been trying to get on one but everything seems to be booked up. Or it's $300! We understand that this town is one you can easily get off and walk around in, so I think that's what I'll be doing tomorrow. Have a good night and I will talk to you tomorrow!
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