Arctic Circle Tour - Limoux to Helsinki

John and I were really looking forward to the tour of Finland and Norway. We had never been to either country and John was looking forward to visiting Santa’s workshop as he had some outstanding unresolved issues he needed to discuss.

We drove to Toulouse, dropped the hire car off at the airport, grabbed some food at a really nice airport restaurant and stayed the night at

an airport hotel.

We flew Lufthansa, a great airline, and changed over at Munich. I had accidentally booked the wrong connection flight which meant a 5 hour stopover there instead of 90 minutes. John was not happy until he remembered that Munich was the spiritual home of beer and he settled in well until our connection.

It was really hard to get a feel for Helsinki. We arrived late in the afternoon. The light was very “thin” if you can describe it like that, all the words on shops and signs looked alien and it was very neat and organised. It was summer so the trees had leaves and the gardens looked lovely. The shops did not have a lot of window dressing – we thought this may be due to the long cold periods where people wouldn’t care to stand about in the snow.

More about Helsinki in a few days.

We settled into our hotel – thanks Alex for the room tips – we ended up with a great room for the full stay. The hotel, Scandic Park – Mannerheimintie Helsinki was a 20 minute walk into the town centre. We stayed in Scandic Hotels quite a few times on the tour.

On arrival at the hotel the receptionist greeted us with "Hei" which is hello in Finland and Norway. Sometimes we got a "Hei, hei" which we thought was extra friendly. We loved it and felt happy that we were able to manage at least one Finnish word.

Next: Arctic Circle Tour – Tallin, Estonia