It was a long trip home. We left the Helsinki hotel at 5:30am Saturday morning, got home Sunday around 2:30pm – with a 10hour time difference. It was about 16 hours in the air – 3 hours to London, a very long layover; about 7 hours to JFK with an overnight in a hotel (which […]

Dan really enjoyed the hotel we stayed at in Helsinki, especially the view from our room and the sunsets (or lack of them probably more on point). This was a series he took that later showed this bright white light appearing, disappearing, appearing again. Never did figure out what it was. On the last day […]

Who knew you could find 3 days of stuff to do in Helsinki? We really weren’t sure when we booked this, but wanted to stay 5 nights because of the deal we got at the hotel. In the end we decided it didn’t matter, that it might actually be nice to have a slower pace […]

I’m writing this just about a day late. We got in pretty late last night, at least for us – after 11pm sometime – and I was so tired I went straight to bed. Usually I start putting the blog together about 9 or 10pm and it takes at least 2 hours typically; there was […]

If you read yesterday’s entry, we talked about this fascination we had with the idea that there wouldn’t really be a nightfall. Not completely anyway. And it doesn’t look like that happened. I went to bed about 1am and slept through until about 6:30am. Dan happened to be up at 2am and took the following […]

We really enjoyed our time in Barcelona. And, 3 days was enough. We were ready to go. We loved the scenery and really loved the food, and the history was pretty interesting. But it was hot, humid, loud, and had a frenetic party kind of vibe that just wasn’t us. And I swear they smoke […]

Barcelona is a Gaudi town, as in Antoni Gaudi, an architect known for something called Catalan Modernism. You see his influence all throughout the city and, unless you’ve studied his work in depth (we didn’t), it’s hard to know which buildings are really him and which are merely influenced by him. And boy does this […]

Parc de Montjuic is more of district than an actual park, although there’s a lot of park-like terrain in the district. It has played a central role in major events in Barcelona, especially the 1929 International Exposition and the 1992 Summer Olympics. We had a simple breakfast in the apartment, including yogurt, ham and soft-boiled […]

Today was the first official day of Dan’s vacation (we’ll just ignore that he’s on a conference call at this moment…approaching 10pm….) so he slept in since we weren’t on any kind of real schedule. I got up about 7am and planned the details of the day. He got up about 8:30. We took our […]

I slept a pretty good 7 hours; Dan only about 5; we were both up before 7am. We went down for breakfast in the hotel about 8 and he was off to work by 8:30am. I literally had no plans for the morning, other than to stop by a bank for cash which was my […]