Shurtz Start Two Finnish: Archipelago Loop with the Kites

Monday morning began with our usual walk.
It was amazing to see how much these flowers had blossomed since Friday.

There was a package at a pickup point locker in Galleria. Elder Shurtz called to get the pin code, and Sister Kakkinen and I walked over to get it. It was too hot to be walking.

When the Espoo district came for district council, one of the sisters asked me about her package. I looked it up and realized that it was in a locker in an omaposti location.

Elder Shurtz and I walked to it on our way home for the day.

There are lots of lockers there of various sizes. You can pick up packages and can also put packages in there to be mailed if you have done everything online and paid and printed the postage.

Tuesday morning, we left our apartment at 7:00 and drove to the Kites place. We loaded our things into their car and headed out on an adventure. I worked on my sock and was able to get it finished!

The first stop was near Turku where they built huge cruise ships.

It was fun to watch them lower a large modular piece into place on the ship.

This is where they built the world's largest cruise ship.

It was finished within the last year and shipped out from here.

At the end of this pier there were lots of people lined up, all with fishing poles in the water.

Next stop was in Naantali. We walked around for a bit.

We found the walkway to the island to muumimailmaa (muumi land).

Also at Naantali, we saw and smelled some beautiful lilacs and walked around an interesting church which was not open yet, so we couldn't go inside.

There was a beautiful cemetery there as well.

This adventure that we were on was a trip around the archipelago loop.

There are over 40,000 islands in the Turku archipelago.

Of course we were only going to a very few of the islands on this adventure.

Naantali was the starting point. The road goes from island to island for a while over bridges, but then comes to a point where we had to take our first ferry of the day. Steve is watching the ferry pull in.

We ate our lunch on this ferry ride as it was one of the longer ferry rides, and it was lunch time.

As we continues our drive, we saw some funny signs.

We figured we better not drive off the edge of the road.

We got to the next ferry with enough time to watch for it to come.

On the island of Mossala, there was an observation platform.

We hiked a short ways to the tower and climbed up to see the view.

We sure love these great friends!

A picture of us in the observation tower.

Some interesting rocks that we saw stacked up - not sure why.

While waiting for the next ferry, Steve noticed a fish farm.

He was trying to figure out a way to get closer to it. No luck though.

The next island had some interesting old boat houses. Some were falling over onto each other.

Quaint mailboxes and bus stop at Kivimo.

After a long ferry ride, we made it to Houtskär, the island where we were planning to spend the night.

We stopped at grocery store and bought some groceries for breakfast the next day.

We also bought ice cream.

The place that the Kites had found on Booking.com was at the tip of the island.

It was perfect. It had two bedrooms, kitchen, living room and bathroom.

It was a beautiful location, with a beach right next to it. We went out for a walk to explore the beach.

Near the old pier that we were walking on, there was lots of nasty looking stuff. It looked like someone had dumped yellow paint into the water. We think that it is the pollen that we could see everywhere floating on the water. Later on we saw a car with pollen all over it and where they had squirted the windshield to wash it, we could see drips of what looked like yellow paint.

We saw this funny sign at the end of the pier.

You can see that there isn't even any water at the end of the pier to dive into, just rock!

I guess the water used to be much higher right there?

We drove to the old church and enjoyed walking around both outside and inside.

It had a ship hanging from the ceiling and some beautiful paintings.

We went to the Sybarit restaurant to eat our dinner. We were glad that there was a place open.

We found that many places don't actually open until June 1 and some not until June 27!

We forgot to take a picture.

This is the view from the window of our apartment at 9pm.

Wednesday, our journey continued.

It would have been fun to stay for a couple of days in Houtskär, but we had to move on.

Steve and I got up and went for a walk. It was beautiful. The temperature was just right for walking.

This is a picture of the building where our apartment was. We were on the 2nd floor.

When we walked on the beach, we ended up scaring some geese and they ran into the water and flew away. The birds were singing and we even heard a cuckoo. There were lots of beautiful flowers.

And lots of fun old buildings.

The lilacs smelled so good!

A view of the church.

We went back to the apartment and got ready for the day and ate breakfast.

We loaded the car and went on one final quick walk with the Kites so they could show us

the meditation trail that they found on their walk.

We took one wrong turn on the way to the ferry, so we were cutting it close,

but we got there in time and were able to get on the ferry.

Steve was following our route on his phone.

He found it funny that the phone showed our car driving across the water.

There was a big bus next to us on the ferry.

On Korpo we took a little side trip over a bridge. We weren't sure just what we would find.

We were driving past an orchard of what looked like small apple trees.

We pulled into the driveway just past the orchard and learned that they make and sell apple juice.

This woman grew up here and has been running it for the past 13 years.

There were two different varieties of juice. The two couples each bought one 3liter pouch,

each a different kind so we could try both.

She let us go out into the orchard to look at the trees.

They keep them small so they can pick the apples easier.

We could tell by the size of the trunk that these are not young trees.

They were even shorter than I thought looking at them from a distance.

We stopped at a hotel that used to be a barn.

The inside was interesting. Very short doorway.

Steve was particularly interested in the rock it was built out of.

There was also an interesting mural painted on it.

There was a trail leading to a beach so we walked along it.

Because it is still not quite high season, everything was so quiet and peaceful!

It wasn't so peaceful when Steve climbed up on this big rock and must have come too close to a nest. These birds were almost attacking him and squawking loudly!

They chased him right off the rock.

The next ferry had us right next to this logging truck.

We stopped for lunch in Nagu - also known as Nauvo.

(Pronounced like nowvo, not to be confused with Nauvoo.

We visited the church.

It had amazing acoustics, so Steve, Outi and Greg tried singing a song.

We made a quick stop to see the mirrored rocks.

We stopped at a place that said it was famous for its princess cakes.

There were some interesting old log animals.

We decided that we weren't all that hungry so we ended up not buying any of the baked goods.

We understood that the pink dome was the princess cake.

In Pargas we walked around an old town area.

Bell tower near the church.

More interesting grave markers.

A couple of fun mailboxes.

a selfie at the canal

Old castle ruins at kuusisto

Stopping for a snack.

Some interesting wood sculptures just down the road a ways.

Just look at those beautiful clouds.

We even saw some cows! A rare site in Finland.

On our Thursday morning walk we saw that the roses are starting to come out.

The purple lupine are even more colorful than they were on Monday.

I especially liked this one bunch that looked like little gnomes with their curved hats.

Elder Shurtz went over to the mission office and I stayed at our apartment to mend the bag to the

roll-up. The Espoo 2 missionaries were planning to use it on Friday and the bag was ripped.

We went for a walk in the afternoon when I was having a hard time staying awake.

It was beautiful outside. The lilacs near the office were in full bloom and very fragrant.

On Saturday, we did our laundry and did some cleaning in the apartment,

but we took a break and went to a couple of museums in Vantaa.

The City Museum is housed in the old train station. It is a beautiful building.

Mostly the exhibits were about life in the 90's. We enjoyed looking at all the old phones.

Did you every have any of these phones?

Here is the signage that goes along with them if you want to learn more about each one.

We decided to walk over to the other museum that was nearby.

Heureka is a science museum. It is well done and we enjoyed it.

We thought it would be especially fun to take grandkids to this museum.

This exhibit allowed you to see how long your intestines would be if they were all stretched out.

You could ride a bicycle across the room on a tight rope.

We did not actually try that one.

Steve tried playing rock, paper, scissors with a robot.

Saturday evening, we got to join via video call to watch Rachel's baptism.

We also enjoyed talking to Talmage for his birthday on Saturday,

and to Enoch for his birthday on Sunday.

Last week when we went to the Haaga Rhododendron Garden, we thought that

we needed to go back in about a week to see the blossoms out at their peak.

After church, we drove to to the Garden to check it out. It was amazing!

It seemed that lots of other people had the same idea!

So many beautiful blossoms!

There were lots of vendors there selling ice-cream and probably other things as well. I thought that we should have come on a different day so we could buy some ice-cream.