Helsinki to Stockholm and Beyond

Don't compare European cities! They all have their own history, people, geology, dot, dot, dot,and most important a fatigue factor a traveler is feeling when visiting a particular place.

The Trek kicked off at 6:00 a.m. when we left the hotel, grabbed a cab to the ferry building in Tallinn and rolled for two hours, arriving in Helsinki at 9:30 a.m. Our tour guide was a nice young man who had been given some wrong information by the tour company. He was a little flustered in the beginning, but got it together to give us a great overview of this part of Finland. What you quickly come to understand about this part of the world is that if it wasn't the Russians taking you over, it was the Swedes and when these two weren't watching the Germans were more than happy to grab all they could. This is the experience of Finland in spades. When visiting the museums and reading the various stories you quickly realize it will be quite some time before trust of Russia is a high element in either the Estonians or Finlanders vocabulary.

So move on Mark. The following picture is of a monument to Sibelius a gentleman considered by most Finns as their most accomplished composers. The piece represents organ pipes, a key instrument in many of his works.

The next site was the Church in the Rock, a Lutheran facility that was literally cut out of solid granite. The acoustics in the place were amazing

We then went into Old Town (there is one in every town so far) and visited the Lutheran Cathedral. Wow! Donations are good in Helsinki. Of course maybe the fact that 90% of the population practices this faith could account for the magnificent nature of this building.

It was time to jump our ferry and start our boat ride to Stockholm. The archipelago that runs from Helsinki down through Sweden is awesome. Thousands of islands which are the result of Mother Earth winning the battle against the glaciers.



So it is now midnight and we are being picked up really early this morning so I a going to close this post with a couple of other videos in Stockholm. The most amazing are of the Stockholm Olympic Stadium from the 1912 Olympics. We actually got on the field and walked around. It was so cool.

There is going to be a whole lot more about Stockholm. It was fantastic! We had an amazing guide, Soren. He gave us the most amazing tour and will be very difficult for the following guides to come close. Take care and will check in tomorrow night from Oslo and complete my Stockholm post.