Saikari

This is one of my favourite places in the world, Niinivesi, Rautalampi. If I could get rid of all mosquitos and "paarmas" (horse fly, probably) it would be number 1. We have spent more time here this summer than any of the previous summers. Not only because the weather has been so good. For the first time, we went around Kotasaari near Vaajasalmi by boat. I had studied the map and found out that it might be a beatiful boat ride. My other favourite ride is from Saikari to Lohimaa, Tervo. On that route you will go through Härkäsalmi which has some of the quintessential Finnish lake scenery http://kansalaisen.karttapaikka.fi/linkki.html?x=3488282&y=6976921&scale=16000&text=Härkäsalmi&lang=FI.

Vasamuseet in Stockholm

I have visited Stockholm countless times but I had never visited Vasamuseet. My colleague said that it would be worth a visit and off we went. We took a ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm and we had couple of hours to walk around Stockholm. Because my family was with me, I decided to go to places they might like. We had just enough time to visit Skansen and Vasamuseet. The latter, I must say, is one of the best museums I have ever visited. My daughter was especially interested in the skeletons of the crew members.

Piece of Finland in Dubai

Resaurant is upstairs, apparently...

Visiting UAE

In the end of March, I visited the United Arab Emirates. First, I went to Abu Dhabi for a couple of days and then I went to Dubai. The country gave me some mixed feelings. First of all, this was the place I knew from the postage stamps. I used to have stamps from Fujeira and Sharjah and they usually had pictures of Disney characters and American movie actors and actresses. The funny thing was that the stamps were always unused. When I saw Dubai for the first time it looked like a huge construction site. There were cranes everywhere. I think I heard that 30 % of the cranes in the world are in Dubai. This did not look like the other muslim countries I had seen on TV. They have so much money but almost nothing historic was preserved. This was my main disappointment. What a perfect place for the sports elite of the world to spend their free time...

Authors' Guesthouse, Key West

This time we are staying in one of the B&Bs Author's Guesthouse. One of the prerequisites for Kia was a pool because we spent her birthday here, she wanted to have a pool in the hotel. We stayed in the Wilder room http://www.authorskeywest.com/wilder.htm Yesterday, instead of a cake, we had huge ice creams to celebrate Kia's birthday.
Today we leave Key West and move 50 miles closer to Miami because there are only two nights left of our vacation. The next stop is in Key Colony Beach near Marathon. On the way there we are going to stop at Bahia Honda State Park. It seems to have one of the best beaches in Florida and you can snorkel right off the beach. Maybe we will spot some Key deer on No Name Key. Key deer is an endangered species that only lives here. It's like a normal deer but much smaller.

Relaxing in Key West

This is the end of the Florida Keys. It's only 90 miles from here to Cuba. Yesterday we went to see the sunset celebration on Mallory Square. Many of the performers were the same as two years ago but there were some new ones. There were jugglers, escape artists, a bagpipe player, singers and last but not least: a dog in red shorts on a tightrope. This is also a popular stop for the cruise ships and yesterday there were two of them here. Last time we were here in March and it was really different back then. This time there were no students on a spring break and even though there were a lot people, the town was not as noisy as before. There were more chickens around though...

Another guest at Sunset Cove

Today is Kia's birthday. Our daughter is 9 years old now. The Pirinen family sent a greeting over an SMS. Before we read it Kia was a bit angry because we had not sung to her this morning. Actually, Minna sang happy birthday but she was still a bit asleep so she did not remember it.
In the morning, I noticed another guest below the pier. It's good that this nurse shark was noticed today instead of yesterday because Kia wouldn't have swum at all if she knew that there were sharks around here...

Sunset Cove's regular guest

This bird, whatever it is, is one of the frequent guests. Mostly it was standing on top of the tiki hut on the beach.

Sunset Cove Motel

The upstairs apartment was ours. Excellent sunset view. This is the best apartment in Sunset Cove. Maybe we should've just stayed here for the rest of our vacation. If we ever go to Florida again, we'll skip Orlando and Miami and come directly here and do some fishing and snorkeling. Something had changed here: the talking parrot was gone. Last time here there was a parrot who could imitate cats and say goodbye.

It took us almost the whole day to get from Orlando to Florida Keys but it was worth it. Sunset Cove in Key Largo is a place where we keep coming back. How we found this motel in the first place was the Lonely Planet Florida guide. This is our gateway to Keys and this is our third time here. It’s good to stay here the first night, because it’s still 100 miles from here to Key West. We’’ve stayed quite close to the highway on our previous trips but now we got a room from on the gulfside with an excellent view. I bought some snorkeling gear for Kia and Minna and we went snorkeling. However, this beach is not very exciting snorkeling spot. Maybe we’ll take a trip out on the reef later this week.

Revelation

Suddenly, in Kissimmee, we saw a sign. It told us to turn to Jesus. We turned right.

Celebration, Fl

I’ve wanted to come here ever since I knew this existed. This is a town built by Disney and it’s supposed to be an ideal smalltown America type of town. The yards are tidy and the houses are traditional American homes. The movie theater across the lake is very art deco. There was a documentary about Celebration couple of months ago on Finnish TV and they said that there are even divorces here. At least the facade is perfect. One funny thing happened here: There were some big birds having sex close to the pier and I don't think it's legal here... Pictures come later...

More pictures from the second day

Kia, Minna and Jaws. Today, Sunday, I am planning to go to the Incredible Hulk rollercoaster which I believe is the best ride in Islands of Adventure. http://www.universalorlando.com/ioa_attr_hulk.html I am already getting tired of waiting in lines.

Some pictures from the second day

Kia had a cartoon picture made of herself and I think that some of the others the artists did looked more alike than this. The park was more crowded on Saturday than on Friday and it was more difficult to get to the rides. However, I can't imagine how long the lines can be at maximum. For examples, to get to the Dueling Dragons, you had to go through a long labyrinth of rope to even get to the end of the line. When you got there, it took only 20 minutes to get to ride. If you didn't go for the front row: this had another line and of course only 4 people were taken from that line at a time. In some cases, the lines were 60 minutes long. The easiest time to get to the rides is before the park closes at 7 pm. The lines were only 5 minutes long then.

On the way to Universal Studios

We have 5-day tickets to two parks: Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure. The Universal Studios has mainly attractions based on visual effects. The funniest one was probably Shrek 4-D (4-D comes from 4 doors which lead to the theatre…). Kia was a bit scared for the loud sounds and the rain (or saliva) effects and kept her eyes and ears shut most of the time. After this experience she was not very eager to go to the other rides. With some extortion and bribery we coaxed her to go to most of the rides. Kia’s favourites were the Woody Woodpecker rollercoaster, which she took twice, Back to the Future, which was a 3-D movie with almost freely moving seats (car seats, that is), ET, which was just a trip around some moving puppets, Jaws, which was a plastic shark and some explosions, Fear Factor Live, where some members of the audience was doing stunts and blowing up stuff, and Animal Planet, where some trained animals were doing tricks. I was missing monkeys. They are the funniest animals. OK, there was one monkey wearing diapers and waving a bra. My kind of humour…
My favorite was Return of the Mummy. The name comes from the fact that I was crying Mami the whole time :-) The ride was short but excellent. First, the cart shot up accelerating. Normally, in rollercoasters, the first upward lift is slow. In this case the cart was shooting up the ramp and then a sudden drop. Computer graphics, water splashes and fire in a dark indoor rollercoaster. The best effect was the burning ceiling in one of the rooms. It looked similar than the educational films that show how a room sets on fire. You know, a flat fire over the whole ceiling. And this was real fire... Also Twister was excellent. They created an authentic feeling of a tornado indoors. There was rain, a real tornado and a burning gas stations within 5 meters of the spectators. Again, short, but excellent. The stormy sky was beamed onto a large screen and in the front you could see the gas station and a drive-in movie theater with a flying cow and flying neon signs.

In the daytime you would have to queue 30 minutes for the attractions but after 6 pm the queues were only 10 minutes.

The car

Instead of Chevy Impala we got Ford Taurus. It can even measure fuel consumption. On the way from Miami to Orlando it was about 21 miles per gallon. The gas price here has really gone up since I was here last time. Now it’s around $2.25/gallon. 2 years ago it was around $1.70/gallon. In the picture Minna is applying sunscreen on Kia’s head. There’s a supermarket here which is open 24h and they have a good selection of beers from places I have been before: Brahma from Brazil and Aguila from Colombia. I thought you couldn’t get Aguila from outside Colombia.

However, the temperature on the pool deck was enough for me at 9 in the morning.

The first day

Normal situation: Kia never leaves a pool voluntarily.
Situation in Orlando the first morning: The water was so cold that she herself suggested that we should go back now… The pool was not heated after a chilly night and the temperature of the water was too low even for her.

Finally in Florida

I had upgraded the first leg Helsinki-Paris into business already in January and I had decided not to tell my family beforehand. I was expecting them to be surprised but my wife did not say anything. Eventually I had to ask what she thinks about the seats and she said that there's nothing special. Yet, she drank two bottles of champagne on the way to Paris. On the way back, I will use the last upgrade for me alone. They can travel in coach, if "there's nothing special in business seats".

My test message

This is a test posting.