My Passport’s Travels

It’s finally here! From receipt of our booking confirmation on October 11, 2023 to now, it’s been a long wait!

We kicked off travel day with breakfast at The Brunch District with Scott and Kassie, who were coming straight from Love Field after picking up Allison and Abigail who are home for Thanksgiving break. We missed you Alyssa, Justin and Luke! After a great catching-up session (and amazing pumpkin roll French toast), Mom and I headed home to finish our last little bit of packing, which lead to waiting anxiously for our ride to the airport. We were quite proud of ourselves, managing to get everything into one suitcase and one carry-on each!

Scott and everyone pulled up right on time at 1pm for our quick ride to DFW, and an early birthday celebration for Mom!

1:34 and we had checked our bags, verified passports and were through the TSA check. And onto the next long wait – our flight didn’t board until 4:15 (ended up being 4:40 boarding). While we waited, I grabbed a cheese and fruit box to snack on – and Mom made the better choice, a Whataburger. By the time dinner was served on the flight, I was starving!

We were in an Airbus A350-941, seats 51B and C (there is no A seat so it was just the two of us). The flight path went N – NE up over Lake Erie, onto Montreal and eventually crossed Greenland and Iceland into Helsinki.

Flight Pros:

• Leg Room – I could have laid down on the floor between my seat and the flight attendants seat
• Ease of restroom access
• A “two-er” row, so we could wiggle to our hearts content and only bother each other
• Absolutely amazing flight crew. The flight attendant who faced us for take off and landing was so sweet! She looked the other way as we hid things in our pockets that we would want on the flight – Finnair says you can only hold one thing in an exit row during takeoff/landing. Once we landed, she jumped up to the overhead bin and started handing us our things so we wouldn’t have to go backwards to get to it. Just all around lovely!
• Meal service – I thought the chicken Curry for dinner was great! It came with rice and veggies, a side of Cole slaw (please don’t ask me why), a roll and a brownie. And they serve blueberry juice – it’s a special blend produced just for them. (I will note, Mom didn’t enjoy dinner. So this wasn’t a complete win for Finnair.)

Cons:

• Because it was an exit row, we didn’t have storage in front of us. The overhead bin was behind us and I couldn’t close it, so we ended up not going back into our carry on bags for things like our charging blocks and my earbuds.
• It was hard to see – I had to turn around and look through the window behind me and Mom could kind of see out of the little window on the exit door.
• Proximity to the restroom – 10 hour flight means lots of people going to the restroom and the bright light shining off and on in our eyes all night.
• The seats were comfy once you got into them, but it was a tight fit for me at first.
• Meal service – breakfast was a cheese omelette (dry!!) with hash browns. And I’m afraid the coffee was barely drinkable.
• For various reasons, neither one of us slept well. I catnapped off and on for a couple of hours and Mom slept a good hour towards the end of the flight.

Flying into Helsinki was really interesting – it was all forest with little villages until you land. Sadly, no snow – the flight attendant (gosh I wish I had gotten her name) told us that it’s late this year, we should have gotten to see some.

We deplaned and headed straight through passport control. Finnland is a one of the Schengen countries in Europe that have a shared passport control – meaning that if you pass between two Schengen countries, you don’t have to go through Customs. (It’s all but two of the EU countries and four additional countries – including Switzerland and Iceland.)

We wandered through the airport – one of the stores was selling reindeer pelts! I couldn’t help it, I had to feel them, so soft! Like Lilly Belle right after a bath.

Eventually we found the Finnair Lounge. I had purchased passes for us because we have a 6 hour layover. What a lovely treat – the food was nice (not spectacular, although the chicken pasta bake and some sort of wheat roll with things in it (maybe olives??) were really good), I enjoyed a glass of wine and a latte, and Mom enjoyed a nap. The best part was that it was quiet, not crowded and we were away from the hub-bub of the terminal.

It was finally time to board the second leg – this was just a 2 1/2 hour flight, but it felt really long. I think in the future, we’ll break it up with an overnight stop if we can’t go non-stop to Europe. Lack of sleep and strange meal times had us both about done by the time we got to dinner (after checking in at our hotel). Again, the crew was wonderful. But sadly, we couldn’t see anything landing after dark.

Leaving the airport was quick and easy, we grabbed our bags, grabbed a taxi and he dropped us off at Hotel Limmathof. Along the way, we went through a couple of long tunnels. They act like express lanes – shortcuts under the city, except there’s no toll.

The hotel will be good for the couple of nights we’re here, but (most likely because we were exhausted and starving) it was a rough start. The entrance we were dropped off at has 12 steps into the lobby area – or you can walk around the corner to the other entrance, where there are only 5 steps into the lobby area. The elevator is tiny! We barely fit with our two big suitcases and my rolling carryon. The tub has a huge step up to get in and we haven’t found the thermostat (although the room temperature is lovely).

That said – we have an amazing river view, can see the train station and a museum across the river. The room temp is lovely. And they still use real keys!

Breakfast is included in our room rate, so we’ll see how that goes tomorrow – especially because we arrived to find out the hotel restaurant closes at 5:30 in the evenings. If worst comes to worst, there’s a Starbucks next door that does mobile order in! (Although we were shocked that they closed at 8pm – on a Saturday! We’re so spoiled!)

Since we couldn’t have dinner as planned – we left the hotel and walked across the street to Central 1 at the Central Plaza hotel. Mom had the pulled beef bbq burger (she said it was pretty good, but strange to have lettuce and tomato on pulled beef). I had the Wiener Schnitzel which was amazing – it came with lemon wedge and lingonberry sauce. We both thought the French fries were to die for – super crispy and hot.

Back in the room, we unpacked, Mom was asleep by 9:30 and I turned out the lights at 10. We have an early alarm tomorrow!