All of Our Wishes Came True!

Finland | Nov 30 - Dec 6, 2024

This place is amazing, I actually wish we could have stayed here longer than one night. They have a hot tub and provide you with robes and head scarfs so when you are in the hot tub your head is warm too! Really a great place and you can just walk right over to Santa's Village. The food was really good too. We had a great dinner!

Wow what a great way to travel when you need to move about a country....you don't lose any time seeing the sights. We hopped on the train in Helsinki at 11:00 pm and arrived in Rovaniemi at 11:00 am the next day with a good rest, shower and a decent breakfast. The sleeper bunks were comfortable, the rattle of the train helped you sleep and the bathroom was quite a unique item. I have never seen a door that opens into the toilet and provides you with a shower! Very talented person who invented that for tight spaces.

This hotel is in a good location and had an amazing breakfast and such wonderful character with the building. We stayed here for a couple of nights and could easily walk to any restaurant, site or whatever we wanted to do. The only bummer was the elevator was broken while we were there and my poor husband had to carry both LARGE suitcases up the winding staircase for two flights! What a champ!

This B&B type place was way off the beaten path, but the folks who own it are very nice. We had in our 2 night stay and it included a sauna and Finnish dinner. We didn't see much of the property because we were touring day and night, but on the last night for the sauna and dinner, well it was amazing! The sauna is high end with his and her bathrooms and the sauna is situated at the end so you can both walk in from your bathroom. Very nicely built and then we sat down for a great dinner consisting of salmon and roasted vegetables. It was really very, very good. The B&B part of the place was very nice with each room having it's own kitchenette, bathroom and bed area. They provided breakfast in your suite and you just had to whip it up!

We had a great walking tour of the city with lots of information. We enjoyed dinner at Seahorse that night, really, really good food!

We took the ferry (this is a cruise ship) over to Tallinn for the day and had a tour guide who enthusiastically took us all around the city. It was absolutely freezing this day! Anyway, we visited the Christmas market and then had a great dinner at Rataskaevu 16. Then headed back to the ferry to Helsinki. The ferry is easy, and they have duty free on board. It takes about 2 hours to get over there and then 2 hours back, but the seats are comfortable. They provide food to buy, but we didn't do that.

Andrei was our guide here. Unfortunately there was no snow (December 3) and they made a small track for the reindeer to take us around at least for photo ops. They also provided us with hot juice and cookies in the small fireside house and talked a lot about the reindeer and traditions so that was nice. There are 180,000 reindeer and 200,000 people! The reindeer are free to leave but always come back because they have food. Another interesting fact is every reindeer is owned by someone and it's rude to ask how many reindeer they have or what they cost....it's like asking how much money do you make.

We had the best guide here. Rosana is from Italy and goes all over the world being a tour guide for different countries at different times of the year and she knew so much about Finland. We went hiking to the frozen waterfalls and saw folks literally scaling up the ice! We stopped and she provided lunch she had carried in her backpack for us which was really good too. We had fun seeing nature and experiencing nature's amusement park by sliding down your back on certain parts of the trail. Beautiful!

Again no snow here either for our trip (December 4). They were really nice in getting us all geared out in warm jumpsuits and we did a short trail with a sleigh on wheels instead so they were very accommodating. They served us gogli juice and cookies too. Seems to be a tradition in Finland.

The sauna is really, really nice. You have a his and her bathrooms where you can change and then walk into the sauna at the end of the bathrooms. The quality of build here is amazing. We really enjoyed it and then showered up for an amazing meal prepared by the owners. They made us salmon and roasted potatoes. We actually brought our own wine from the US and they allowed us to enjoy it with our dinner. A really nice experience.

Oh my gosh! What a small world we live in. Our guide was from Australia and so were our friends and they actually went to the same school together, but were about 3 years apart so they didn't know each other. Alexi was our guide and he just kept chasing the Northern Lights until we found an amazing spot and got to actually watch them materialize before our very eyes! We were situated near a lake and he made a campfire and took pictures. The pictures attached are just from my iPhone which are great too.