Stockholm!! We visited the Royal Palace:
and the Gamla Stan (old town):
We did visit Kotka, Finland, but took no tour, because we had two tours and a mission in Helsinki. First, a walking tour, the same one we had taken four years ago. This one featured really good coffee and cinnamon rolls as a break. Detail from the Rock Church, which was dynamited into existence over about four months in the late 60's:
The Senate Square:
And we took an out-of town tour to see Hvittrask, home of Eero Saarinen, the famous architect.
On the way, we passed through a town called Espoo (pronounced Espo, like expo). So what's so famous about that? Why, their favorite son, that's what. Ask any rabid Formula 1 fan. They'll tell you who was born there. We're betting that very few of us have ever been there, though.
Our mission was to find Scarpa shoes. Pati searched out a place that might have had them and figured out how to get there. She hit pay dirt at the CAMU store in Helsinki and got them on sale. Shoes safely aboard, we set off for Tallinn, Estonia, where we'd been before and had visited the old town. This time we went to Kadriorg Palace, one of the homes of Peter the Great and Catherine, his second wife, when Russia ran the show. Those old Russians knew how to dress up a place both indoors and out. By the way, in Estonia, they still call them "busses".
Last stop on this leg of the journey was Copenhagen, where the search for shoes continued. Pati tracked down another outdoors store, plotted it on the map, and this time Gordon got exactly the shoes he was looking for. Bingo!! Done!!
