Europe

Today we had a leisurely start to our last day in Saint Petersburg. We relaxed over a nice breakfast before heading back to our room to re-pack our suitcases.

We checked out of the lovely Astoria hotel and hopped in the car for the half-hour drive to the airport. Our chauffeur dropped us off at the airport at about 12:30pm and we checked in, cleared immigrations and customs, and then headed to the lounge to relax before our 2:30pm flight to Helsinki.

The flight time was only about 40 minutes so by the time we’d flicked through a couple of magazines and had a cup of tea, we were descending into Helsinki. The Helsinki airport is undergoing major renovations at the moment so we were met by a bus on the tarmac. We had a rather long drive to the terminal before an implausibly long walk to the immigration area. We haven’t been to Helsinki airport for a number of years and we were surprised by how much it has grown.

Once we collected our luggage we headed out and were met by our driver for the trip to our hotel, the beautiful Hotel Kämp. The traffic was pretty light and we got to the hotel in around 30 minutes. We checked in and went upstairs to our room to add a layer of clothing before heading out for a short walk. However, we didn’t get very far. Even though the temperature was only -1C, it felt much colder than that. Because the wind comes off the water in the harbour here, the humidity is quite high; this makes it feel much colder than the thermometer reports.

We stopped at a lovely restaurant on the way back and had a beautiful dinner before a brisk walk back to the hotel. We are now inside and thawing out!

We think we’ll probably just relax in Helsinki tomorrow. The forecast suggests that the temperature will get down to -6C overnight and up to -1C during the day. We’ll see how long we last outside sight-seeing!