For previous posts about our trip, start here and go forward.

Day 1 and 2: St Louis to Gothenburg

Day 16: We decided to have a lazy morning and sleep in a bit. It was nice. We had a bike tour booked for 2 pm, and needed to take a train to it, so we hung around the apartment/Airbnb until it was time for a late breakfast/lunch. We went to a place called Cafe Cafferino Oba that served coffee and breakfast, which ended up being greek food. We both had some good eggs, veggies, bread, yogurt, etc, with coffee.

Our guide had given us specific instructions on what train to take to meet him, so we walked to Central Station, and found a train to board. It was pretty easy.

And then it was a short walk from there to the meeting place.

I’d booked a day trip with biking to Seurasaari, a picnic, and a sauna. It looked like a lot of fun and actually ended up being our favorite thing!

We met the guide, Luca, at a sort of garage where he kept the bikes and gear. I had asked about riding an ebike instead so I got one of those, and Louie and Barbara, the only other person on our tour, got regular bikes. We headed out towards Seurasaari, which is an open air museum outside of Helsinki, on an island.

We were very visible with our helmet covers! I loved riding the ebike: it was like riding a regular bike but with help on the hills, so I could go just as fast uphill as on a flat ride.

When we got to Seurasaari, we had to park our bikes and walk as the island doesn’t allow bikes. We did a quick walk through, looking at the outside of some buildings while Luca talked about the history and culture of Finland.

We ended up at a large picnic area with a grill, and Luca started a fire (with wood that you could just use) and we helped prepared a vegan Finnish lunch, with various appetizers he had made, and vegan reindeer sausages.

The food was delicious: some sort of vegan cheese dip, pate, gazpacho, the vegan reindeer sausages, grilled onions, blueberry drink, and more. After eating more than we probably even wanted, we finished walking around the island, and then headed to the next stop: sauna.

We had talked as a group about the various kinds of saunas that we could try and collectively chose what Luca called the “hippie sauna” which was a sauna on the edge of the Baltic Sea, where you could get in the sauna and then jump in the sea. Oh, and most people would be completely nude.

It was called Sompasauna, there would be no pictures, and yes, most people were nude. You quickly learned that nobody cared and just to keep your eyes down, and that WOW it was amazing getting really hot and sweaty in a wooden cabin and then jumping into the freezing sea was amazing once you were really hot! I could have stayed there longer, but we had to get back as our time was almost up, so we left after probably an hour or more. (I didn’t have my watch on during this part).

Anyway, we biked back to where we started (I was really glad I had my ebike as I kept up really easily!) and then said our goodbyes. It was a really terrific day, the sauna was absolutely amazing (I just loved the feeling of floating in the Baltic Sea, so much!) and we had a terrific time. One regret is not getting to spend more time really exploring Seurasaari, but we did see plenty of open air museums on this trip, so it really wasn’t a huge loss, haha.

We weren’t really hungry for dinner as the lunch had been quite late, so after we got back to Helsinki we went to a place called the Beer House, and ended up having a few snacks there like reindeer jerky and cauliflower wings. We also ended up trying Taco Bell that evening: Leslie had teased me that I should try a bean burrito there, and I did, though it wasn’t really a bean burrito but was a “vegan burrito” instead. Louie and I split it back at the apartment and it was nice and hit the spot.

Day 17: Suomenlinna

We decided to go to the fortress of Suomenlinna on our last full day in Helsinki. We didn’t get the earliest of starts again, but we did manage breakfast rather than lunch, ha! We went to Cafe Ekbert and had some delicious pastries and cappuccinos.

We had a cinnamon bun, an almond croissant, and a little sandwich with cheese and eggs and sauce.

We took the ferry to Suomenlinna then: you catch it at Market Square down by the water (obviously). You pay using the HSL app, and the ferry fits a decent amount of people plus up to two cars/small trucks.

We walked around the island then, using some information from Rick Steves, but also just wandering and seeing what looked interesting.

After a few hours, we took the ferry back and continued wandering. We enjoyed a salmon pie and a little pastry with grits on it (unsure of the name) overlooking the water.

We looked at the map and tried to walk through some parts of Helsinki that we hadn’t been to before.

We had one more concert to attend that evening, a staged opera by Mussourgsky called Khovanshchina conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. We had seats behind the orchestra. The music was beautiful and well played, but we were exhausted and just couldn’t seem to follow the plot, and I convinced Louie to bail at intermission rather that stay to the bitter end.

If we had stayed until the end, it would have been too late to have a nice dinner, but of course, we felt conflicted (me less so I really thought I would simply fall asleep if we stayed, ha!) So left and went to search for dinner. The hall was amazing though, the pictures are crazy, aren’t they?

We found a place that served Finnish food and stopped by, they could serve us! Ravintola Skörd, not far from our airbnb. They offered a 4 or 6 course menu, we chose the 4 and split up the choices so that we could taste all the foods. It was another great meal! The trick was that all of the foods were from Finland, in fact, everything except salt, the server said. She was terrific as well, nice and friendly and funny, and a great server. We loved the meal, and enjoyed some Finnish wines made from berries, but they weren’t sweet like you might think, they were dry even. 

After dinner we just walked back to the apartment.

Day 18: We had to check out by around noon as well as leave around then get to the airport. We went to the original cafe we had found on the first day for coffee and pulla, Kulhma Kahvila 48, and then just walked around for an hour or two, figuring we would be sitting plenty in the future!

And then we caught the tram from our airbnb to Central Station, and caught a train to the airport. One thing I possibly regretted is that we didn’t have seats together on the flight: Finnair makes you pay extra for seat choice and I had figured they would put us together. I had figured wrong. We both had aisle seats near each other, but neither of our seat mates would swap. It was fine though, we just enjoyed movies and read of course, but it would have nicer together. Next time I suppose I’ll just shell out for the extra leg room both ways.

We got home exhausted but uneventfully. Our global entry worked great, though since we checked a bag we lost time waiting on it, but it wasn’t an issue as we had a long connection in Chicago.

We ended up with quite a lot of “loot” from the trip: chocolates and such. And Salty licorice for Louie. We’ve been slowly making our way through it.

My favorite so far was the Karl Fazer chocolate with lemon!

Anyway, overall we had a great trip, it was seriously fantastic and amazing. Having had some time to reflect, there were minor things we would do differently but nothing major. I thought we stayed in great places, the itinerary was good if exhausting, the excursions added great value to our vacation, and we just really enjoyed ourselves. I highly recommend any of the cities we visited and would be happy to share even more information with you, so feel free to reach out with questions.