European travels!

AHHHH! October was a crazy month! I apologize for being off the radar for most of the month, but we were busy the whole time and I didn’t find extra time to sit in front of the computer for any great length.  Therefore, my life needs a whole lot of updating and I promise to write more often in the coming months.

ONE of the most exciting things about last month was our first family trip overseas!  Ryan and I took a 10 day vacation to England, Finland, and Estonia.  The weather was yucky for most of the trip—considering we left sunny beautiful-hasn’t-even-turned-fall-yet weather in Virginia.  We definitely did not pack enough warm clothes!  We also went at a non-peak vacation season so a lot of what we wanted to do was not even open or available.  Regardless, we had a spectacular time during the whole trip and we could not have asked for better friends to spend it with. 

We flew to England, stayed 2 days, flew to Estonia/Finland, stayed 3 days, flew back to England for a few days.

The reason we chose England was because my best friend Kellie, her husband Joe, and daughter Ava live just south of London.  She has not had many visitors in her 2.5 years of living there AND it is not often that we will have friends conveniently living in other countries (although right now we have quite a few!) so we decided to take advantage of this opportunity and visit.  Kellie showed us around London—where we saw Queen Elizabeth riding in one of her cars down the street by Big Ben—and also took us to Windsor Castle (where the Queen lives) and Hampton Court Palace (where King Henry the VIII lived).  We also got to see one of Joe’s hockey games—which I think was cool for him because no one they know from the States ever gets to see him play in person anymore.  Best of all, we got some amazing, much-needed quality time between best friends and Ryan and I got to spend lots of time with Kellie and Ava.

Another reason for the trip was to visit our other friends Kristi and Dave in Finland.  Dave is one of Ryan’s offensive line teammates from college and he is studying this year in Sweden/Finland.  He had the week off from school so we planned the trip around this week.  Kristi is about to have a baby (within the next 6 weeks or so) and they have been away from family, friends, and everything they know for the whole pregnancy.  It was nice to get to spend some time with friends who made us feel like we were back in the UP and nothing had changed over the last year.  Again, we were hit with some cold, overcast weather and a lot of places shut down for the winter.  We still managed to have a relaxing and adventurous time.  We spent most of the time in the Old Town part of Tallinn, Estonia.  This was a great place to just take in historic buildings and neat sights. Then, we took a ferry over to Helsinki, Finland and did a bit of sightseeing there.  We took a boat ride to the islands of Suomenlinna, which had a lot of history.  Most of the museums were closed so we made our own tour and explored the nooks and crannies of the island.

Even though it seemed like everything we wanted to do was closed, we were surrounded by friends the whole trip and that is what made it worthwhile.  We have been a little friend-sick over the last few months and this trip was just what we needed to make us feel better!