The trails in the valley were deteriorating as the daytime temps were rising into the 40’s. It was time to head to Portland and make the final decisions for the gear we were going to take with us. The trip back was made with blue skies and clear pavement. The snow was going fast. We stopped to say hi to Doug and Amy in Hood River and catch up with their lives. Arriving to Portland we became quite focused on the task at hand except for the list of projects that Jeff wanted help with. Once again the van proved useful in plant hauling.
Looking forward to checking the apple tree when we return in the Spring.
The several days here were filled with thinking thru our gear list and making sure the clothing we were taking would be what we needed.
Bottom Layers
The head layer
Skis and poles!! So exciting!
Don attended a travel seminar with AAA and came back with some good tips of how to make our voyage easier. The timing of the seminar was perfect. Another project that took on a different direction than originally planned was our itinerary after the ski event. We generally do road trips spontaneously and thought that would be the plan for this trip. However, after looking at different places that we wanted to stay it seemed wise to make reservations. That led to mostly planing our destinations for each night. I guess we will determine when the trip is over if that decision was a wise one. The last thing we had to do in Portland was some work on the van. What was supposed to be a several hour appointment turned into barely done by 5. Finally we were on the road and heading south to San Diego where we will be leaving our van. On the way we took a short break at a wildfire sanctuary. Always fun to explore!
It only took us a day and half to arrive to San Diego and a day later we made all the final preparations for our trip. We used a large duffle to enclose our backpacks.
They were a little awkward to carry, but overall protected the backpacks.
On Feb. 29th, after checking everything more than twice, we were ready to load up the car and head north to the LAX airport.
Thanks to Ryan and Beth for making the 6 hour round trip to the airport!
By 6 we were on the airplane armed with our antiseptic wipes and hand sanitizer. The seriousness of the Covid 19 virus hadn’t been made known yet. We were oblivious to what the world would look like in the near future. Our energies now, though, were just focused on our arrival to Finland and the Border to Border ski. Don put his ear buds in and with the noise canceling button, he was soon asleep. I on the other hand put in my ear plugs and determined that they were pretty much useless. Not to worry, the time ticked on and before we knew it the pilot was on announcing our descent to Gatwick airport on the outskirts of London.
The Gatwick Airport is quite large so even though we had a 6 hour layover we were able to get quite a bit of walking in. We were taking a 3 hour flight to Helsinki which would land close to midnight.
We were hoping that it would be on time as we would have only an hour to go thru customs and make a shuttle that would take us to our hotel. The plane was quite full and as luck would have it the person sitting next to Don had a bad cold.
Fortunately the plane was on time and the airport was pretty quiet when we arrived to Helsinki. We had a big smile on our faces when we saw our two duffles and and ski bag at the baggage claim. We followed the crowds to customs and were relieved when we were quickly cleared.
The next task was to find the shuttle. This didn’t prove to be easy as our bags were heavy and there wasn’t anyone to ask. We headed off and after a few false turns we spotted a sign with the name of our hotel. The only problem was our hotel was not located at the airport. This one was the same chain, so we figured that they could probably give us directions to the shuttle We have 10 minutes to make the shuttle so every minute is precious. I quickly got on the elevator and headed up to the third floor lobby. There was a line so trying to be polite I asked if I could ask a quick question. One women was gracious enough to let me in front of her , but not so another women who just said wait your turn. Finally I asked my quick question and was directed to the shuttle stop. I quickly reversed my steps to where I thought Don was waiting. He wasn’t. Yikes as I look in all directions. Then I heard his voice say to hurry up and come this way. We had about 1 minute to spare when the shuttle pulled up. Needless to say we had some adrenaline in our blood when we finally got to the room about 2:00am. The room was very nicely done with lots of light wood.
We hoped that we would fall into a deep sleep, but that was not to be. It was a night of tossing and turning and looking at the watch realizing that you had just looked at it 10 minutes before. Tomorrow we head to Helsinki and check out the city for a couple of days and hopefully get on this time schedule.
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