Finland Day One

 It was an early start, but not as early as the one earlier in the year for Madeira, thank goodness! and we got to Heathrow in good time for our Finnair flight to Helsinki. It was lovely hearing Finnish again over the plane's communication system.

We had spotted some of our fellow travellers at Heathrow, although done our best to stay clear, as we didn't want to be doing chit chat so early in the morning. Also a  few we recognised from previous trips with the same company and didn't particularly want to engage. 

I'm going to come out here right away and say that we have never travelled with such an obtuse, arrogant, toxic group of Little Englanders and we're taking ourselves off the company mailing list because we neither of us want to run the risk of ever travelling with any of those people ever again. Their behaviour throughout had me at best cringing inwardly and at worst apologising to a lovely Finnish lady for the boorish way in which a member of the group had treated her. 

And while I'm on the downsides, the lovely couple who have preciously accompanied the trips no longer do so; the husband has gone off to work elsewhere and the wife is now just working in the office. The replacements did things in a different more hands-off way, which is probably fine, we were just a bit blind sided because it wasn't what we were expecting. 

But the upsides - oh the upsides, definitely made the trip more than worthwhile. We'd driven from Helsinki to Savonlinna through some beautiful countryside. The vast majority of Finland is trees and lakes and for some people this makes the landscape too monotonous. I suspect I have a thing for monotonous landscapes as I would happily be drive through Finland's lakes and forests or Australia's miles and miles of eucalyptus for hours without getting bored. 

So just a quick word of warning, that the posts about Finland are likely to be very photo heavy! and this one is no exception.

Our hotel was on a lake and we had a lovely view of it from our room. 

After dinner, which many of the group turned up their noses at on the gorunds that they 'didn't know what sort of fish it was and someone had said the meat was reindeer' (sigh! - also it wasn't reindeer, I've had reindeer and this wasn't) but which I thought was delicious, especially considering we had been told we'd be having a cold supper, the OH and I went for a walk along the edge of the lake. 

I think the walk was when we really started to remember how much we loved the place and wonder how on earth it was that we haven't been back for more than 30 years. As people know, the OH loves Orkney and for me it is Australia that feels like 'home', but Finland is a place which makes both our hearts sing.