Day 07 - Thu - 08/13/26 - Helsinki, Finland

This morning we woke up in Helsinki Finland. The ship had arrived at 7 AM and we heard the disembarkation announcement at around 7:30 but that didn't move us to get out of bed until after eight.  We prepared for our day with flowers and dressing and ate a leisurely breakfast in the Lido. While there I purchased online a multi country hop on hop off bus ticket with City Sightseeing tours at https://stromma.com. For €95/pp we are able to take up on hop off tours in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. That covers all countries that we are visiting on this cruise; it worked out to our advantage as individual countries would cost in the range of $40 each. We gathered up our items for the day and made our way down to the bus pick up location just outside the cruise terminal.


It was about a 20 minute wait for the pick up, but once the bus arrived, we borded and secured seats on the top deck. This tour company has a route with 19 stops going throughout the city. Our plan was to take the route around once to get a lay of the land and then stop at a location that interest us. However, we ended up making a loop around to the start and then got off at number two by the Harbor and the market. This allowed us to shop the market and we also had some moose dumplings for a light lunch. We then found stop 12 which took us to stop number 14 which features the Rock Church. This church was literally blasted out of the granite at the location and is quite impressive. It brought new meaning to Jesus' words @On this rock I will build my church." After viewing the church, we then hopped back on the bus to take the loop from 14 around to the beginning so I could get a good picture of the sculpture devoted to John Sebelius, composer of "Finlandia" which is the tune to a favorite hymn of mine. There we got off to take a tour of the Helsinki Cathedral and Senate Square nearby. After doing this, we then re-boarded a bus which took us back to the cruise terminal where we arrived around 3 PM well ahead of our required 3:30pm on board time.


Before going to the 5 PM port talk on Stockholm and Visby, we enjoyed a light snack in the Lido, and watched the departure from the Helsinki cruise terminal. The departure procedure involved backing away from the cruise dock and backwards for about 600 meters to a turnaround basin. The ship rotated clockwise about 90° and headed out to the open sea. We were following the Norwegian Sun and one of the large local ferries.


Jhrumby's port talk was good.  We did learn that the port is an hour from Stockholm and we're not sure if the Hop On Hop Off bus company provides a shuttle.  Our fallback position is to take a local train there.  Afterwards we were't hungry, so we went to the Captain's Circle daily party and had a few light snacks that we counted as dinner.


The evening entertainment was a cast production of "Born to be Wild" which was a high energy show with a Pink Cadillac being the principal prop.


Tonight we gain an hour back and that will be important as it will take an hour to get from our docking location to Stockholm.  But we have an all aboard time of 7:30pm. On the Wake Show (a daily informational TV broadcast anchored by the cruise director, Nick), we learned that all of HOHO bus companies run shuttles to/from the cruise terminal to downtown.  So that narrows our transportation concerns.












Food court


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day -3 & -2 - Tue-Wed - 08/04-05/26 Seattle to Copengagen

Image
We were packed and ready for our departure well before our Pastor picked us up at 11:45am to take us to the airport which is only a few minutes away.     He dropped us off at noon and it took around 30 minutes to wait in line to check in.     My electronic boarding pass said we would be departing from gate S-15.     So we found the TSA checkpoint nearby and waited another 15 minutes before boarding the train to the S terminal where we normally depart from.     Arriving there we saw no departures for our flight and the electronic message board said our gate was A10.     So we re-boarded the train which took us back to the A gates and we were there just after 1pm for a 1:35pm starting boarding time.     Boarding was by group and went relatively smooth, but since we were in group 5 much of the overhead luggage space was taken.     The space over our seats was used for emergency supplies, but I found some nearby space. ...
Read more

Day 01 - Fri - 08/07/26- Embarkation Day

Image
 After a reasonable night's sleep, we woke up around 8am and prepared for embarkation day.  First up was a second visit to the hotel's wonderful breakfast buffet.  We really enjoyed it once again.  We then tried to learn where the bus pickup point was.  The front desk clerk didn't seem to know.  We walked around outside and found a bus stop for the regular city bus route and thought that would be the best way to the port which was about 2km or 1.2 miles away. We retuned to our room and finished repacking and around 10:15am decided to check out and head for the ship.  A second clerk knew exactly where the pickup point was and that was comforting.  We made our way there (about 100 yards north of the end of the light rail station.  There was a temporary sign there and a line of people waiting.  A #25 bus shortly arrived and we were whisked to Terminal #1.  Arriving there it was a short walk to the luggage drop off point.  We then ...
Read more

Day -1 - Thu - 08/06/26- Exploring Copengagen

Image
 We both had a good night's rest and woke up refreshed.  Our room rate includes complementary breakfast so we prepped for our day.  We couldn't get the room safe to open so after breakfast we stopped by the front desk to arrange for a repair.  The breakfast buffet was the best we've ever experienced with a wide selection of fruits, cheeses, meats, bread and pastries, drinks.   We returned to the room and a couple young men came up to open our safe and they, too, could get the door open.  Finally, one of them used a small pry tool and the door swung open.  They didn't have parts to fix it, so they went down to their workshop and were back in 10 minutes with a spring that brought the safe back to life.  With that item fixed, we headed off to the light rail station a few blocks away where a helpful employee aided me in downloading the app to more easily travel on the train.  Trains run every 5 minutes and soon we were under way to the Central St...
Read more