Day 17 - Suomenlinna and Linnanmaki

It was dark this morning when we woke up. We got up at 8am anyway and went downstairs for another nice breakfast, but it was windy and cloudy outside, with some occasional rain drops. I think both Kell and I were a little afraid this would be the day we get really wet, so we spent some time in the room after breakfast, reading and trying to catch up on the blog. Around 10am we decided to head out and found it still pretty dry.

We found the ferry station after a 10 minute walk from the hotel, bought tickets and were under way in another 10. 

It's a short trip out to Suomenlinna. We'd learned some of the history on both the boat tour and on the city bus tour. In fact we heard it several times on the bus tour. The fortress was built by the swedes, then Russia won a war and Helsinki became the capital instead of Turku and the fortifications were bolstered. So that means you have places on the Island like Kings Gate which refers to the inspection of the fortifications by the King of Sweden, and a church that was once Russian Orthodox, but later became an Evangelical Lutheran church. I include this brief over simplification of history as a sort of dare---Go ahead Finnish readers, please correct me in the comment box below.

Anyway, Kelli has posted some pictures. The kids walked, and climbed, and spelunked (long tunnels in the walls), and chased bird to their hearts content. And until they were very tired and hungry. We had a nice lunch on the way back to the ferry and stopped by the gift shop to spend some of the kids' mummu-money.

For the second part of our day, Kelli was hoping to head home with a tired Anni and possibly Maija, while Kai and I went on to Linnanmaki for a little while. Linnanmaki is an amusement park and Kelli made the fatal mistake of opening the plan up for discussion. Of course Anni and Maija wanted to go, so we all got back on the red-line, city-tour, hop-on / hop-off bus which we still had tickets for and which was to get us within walking distance. And mostly, it did. It was a healthy walk and the last 300 meters was up a steep hill. 

We made it and entry to the park was free as promised and indeed there were some free rides, but mostly ones Kai could not ride on. We made a go of it for about an hour. The girls went on some rides and Kell and Kai went to get ice cream at some point. But we were all definitely tired. We decided to head back. 

We walked back down the hill carrying Anni, all of us very tired. We made it to the stop at the Olympic village where we'd left the bus, only to find out that we'd missed the last bus by an hour. Now this sounds pretty dumb, and it is, but we'd spent the previous night trying to find the hours of operation on the red bus line to know avail. And we'd meant to look when we got off, but forgot. Okay it was dumb. Anyway, that was discouraging. We tried looking up a cab company, but finally decided to head 4 more blocks over to the main street, where we tried for a while to hail a cab which was obviously not working. Finally we found a site that explained the Helsinki trams and it turned out that we were right on a line that could drop us (without transfers 2 blocks from our hotel). The turned our spirits around a bit and we finally made it home. 

We ate some of our food in the room. I found another market a couple of blocks away to fill in some of the missing pieces, then got Anni to bed. 

I decided to go out for a jog then and I'm glad I did. Helsinki is a beautiful place for a run. I ran around the bay past the Kauppatori, past St. Henrik's Cathedral, to Kaivopuisto park, and then back around to Uspenskin and around the peninsula where we're staying. And then back to the room, to write this, and then to bed.