Day 12-13 (20-21 Sep 2018) – Shanghai to OKC, Adventures by Disney Enchanted China Adults Only Tour

We were up by about 4:30 am to finish packing and got our suitcases out by 5:15 am then headed down to the lobby where both Daisy and Ralph were waiting for us. We were the only ones leaving at 5:30 am and had a private car that took us to terminal 2 at the Shanghai airport for our Finnair flight.

It wasn’t tough to get checked in and we breezed through thanks to priority check-in as we were flying business class from Shanghai to Helsinki. The group that was taken to the airport even earlier than us weren’t able to check into their flight (they were flying to Tokyo to visit Tokyo Disneyland) when they arrived into the airport and we actually beat them to passport control. We got to the border patrol officer and were directed to step back and fill out a Departure Card. This wasn’t made clear before we got in the passport/border control line.

We hung out at the airport lounge for the next couple hours and ate breakfast which, for me, included noodles with bok choy and sauce. It was really quite good.

Our flight to Helsinki was about 10 hours and followed the typical pattern for all each of our flights: “breakfast” was served and then lights out for rest followed by “lunch”. I didn’t really sleep much and watched a couple of movies and almost finished a third one by the time we landed in Helsinki.

We arrived about 45 minutes early into Helsinki which was great because it gave us plenty of time to get through passport control and find/check-in to the Hilton at the airport. We waited a really long time at passport control – the border officers were super serious about scrutinizing everyone coming into the country. They looked over Seth’s boarding pass for tomorrow, quizzed him about what our purpose was in Finland (just a 24 hour lay over) and where we were staying even asking if we had already made a hotel reservation. By the time I got up to the desk, it was much easier as I had the same story as him.

We navigated our way to the Hilton and checked in then stowed our stuff in our room. I had received another email from Sussy, our tour guide, who was taking the train up to the airport to meet us. We met her in the lobby at around 3 pm and headed out to Helsinki city center via train which took about half an hour and cost us about $14 Euros each for a 1 day pass.

Sussy took us to visit a number of different buildings including a music hall, a stone church ($3 Euros per person entrance fee), a conference center, several markets, and described to us what it was like to be a typical resident of Finland. We stopped in a shop to buy a magnet and concluded our tour at around 6 pm.

Even though our reservation wasn’t until 7 pm, we went ahead and walked over to Finlandia Caviar and were seated at the window on barstools. There was a group of business men in the small cafe that were particularly loud and obnoxious – one of them kept repeatedly inviting us to join them and their language (they were speaking in English) was pretty salty.

It took quite a while to place our order and get our food. We ordered a tasting of 4 caviars – 1 oz each with condiments, 2 vodka flights (one Russian and one Finnish), and a caviar truffle egg.

Russian Vodka Flight

Finland Vodka Flight

We enjoyed our tasting but decided we probably needed more than this for dinner. So we paid for our tasting (it was only $140 Euros) and decided to head back to the train station to have a Hesburger – what Sussy described as being very popular in Finland and similar to McDonald’s. It was really cold outside – low 60s – nearly 50s and windy – as we made our way back to the train station which was only about 5 or 6 blocks away. We each had a hamburger and shared some fries. It was pretty good but quite distinct from our McDonald’s burgers, fries, and ketchup.

The Helsinki train station is pretty easy to navigate and we had different choices of lines that would take us back to the airport – we couldn’t make the next train that was leaving – the platform was too far away so we opted for the next train on platform 1. We easily made our way back to our hotel and called it night early. We didn’t have to be up at any particular time in the morning as our flight didn’t leave until after 2 pm.

We were both up by about 8:30 am and took our time getting ready, taking advantage of the Hilton’s complimentary wi-fi, and took showers. We decided to head over to the airport a bit early to grab something to eat at the Finnair lounge. This time, passport control wasn’t nearly as bad and we relaxed in the lounge for quite a while as I got all of my pictures and nearly all of Seth’s pictures uploaded to my smugmug account.

It was another long flight back to Chicago – about 9 hours and during the flight, we passed over Greenland which was pretty cool to see. It also gave me the chance to finish my vacation blog.

As with all of our Adventures by Disney trips to date, this adventure was certainly no exception – it met and exceeded our expectations and will be a trip that we’ll remember forever and look back fondly at. We’re so glad to have been able to share this adventure with Wade and Charlie too (their first ABD) as we realized during this trip that we had been travel buddies with them for over 10 years now. I think we successfully converted them to ABD Insiders with Charlie talking about how he wanted to do the South Africa ABD in the future. Up next: the planning and saving for my 50^th birthday trip in 2019 – we’re looking at Sonoma for a week to eat at the French Laundry and check out the wine train, wineries, and maybe a cheese tour. We’re planning on the Teskes joining us on this one next year.

Here are all the photos and videos we took on this trip uploaded to my smugmug account. 
(We haven't received the pictures from ABD yet and I need to finish uploading pictures from Seth's camera - as soon as those become available, I'll be incorporating some of those into my blog as well as uploading them to this smugmug folder)