I recently got back from what was, for me, a great adventure. Blogging each day during my three-week vacation in Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Finland, and Iceland was part of the joy. I returned home with many wonderful memories and well over a thousand photographs. And I have come to realize that what I miss most…
I’ve been home for two weeks now. I’ve finally gotten all my photos organized and uploaded to Google Web Albums, and I’ve gone through all my blog posts from the trip and updated them with a few details I’d previous omitted, but mostly by interspersing some of the best pics of the trip.
It’s my last night in Reykjavik, and the last night of my Nordic adventure. Tomorrow at this time I’ll be home. Well actually, I’ll still be in the air somewhere over Canada, as it’s still afternoon in Seattle, and my flight, which takes off at 17:00 local time, lands at 5:45 p.m. Pacific time. In…
Sometime in the last few days, my vacation stopped feeling like I’m on vacation and started feeling like my regular life. It’s as if being in new places, seeing new things, and meeting new people is the norm of my existence. I guess that means I could get used to this. And I guess that…
I can’t think of any words superlative enough to describe the things I saw today. I can talk about where we went, the names of the places, and such. And I can post pictures (check out my Iceland album starting with the picture above), but they are just not an adequate representation.
No matter how well I understand logically that the sun doesn’t set here until almost midnight, when I look outside at 10:30 pm and see bright sunshine, my mind can’t understand why my body is so ready for sleep. Today I got acquainted with Reykjavik. I walked around on my own, then took a free guided…
Yesterday was mostly a travel day, so there wasn’t a lot to blog about, and there still isn’t, since I just woke up and am at a neighborhood coffee shop having what they call an Americano. (I’d call it a slightly watered down espresso.)
I’m going to start today’s post by talking about an interesting confluence related to my trip. About ten years ago when I was singing with the Esoterics, we performed a wonderful piece by the Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae. He wrote this piece in 1997 in memory of the more than 852 people who…
Pretty much all I did today was walk. Helsinki is a very walkable city, but I really covered a lot of ground today.
Today was an “Intro to Helsinki” day. Mary and I bought one-day Helsinki Cards, thinking we’d cram as many of the things the card covers as we could into one day. It was a good idea in theory, but there was only so much cramming we could do, especially given that Mary was suffering from…
Saturday, 26 May 19:30 I’m on the ferry, about an hour from docking in Helsinki. We left Tallinn about five minutes before the scheduled sailing time of 18:00, and I’ve been looking for a place to plug in my phone on this boat because I was bad about conserving the battery today. I finally found…
Thursday 24 May, 22:30 We set sail at 17:45, went through about 4 hours of the most beautiful scenery, the sun has set but the horizon is still glowing red out my cabin’s porthole.
