The Travel Nut

We stopped in Helsinki for one day as part of a two week cruise around Northern Europe and Scandinavia. If you wish to read the enormous post about the whole cruise, then you can click here.

Considering we were only here for a day, I think we managed to see a lot! But, we will definitely go back for a long weekend at some point, as there is still so much we didn’t manage to see and do.

When we arrived in the city (via a shuttle bus from the port), there were lots of little market stalls; food, drinks and local artists selling their homemade crafts (of course I had to buy a homemade Christmas bauble at add to our collection!). This was the perfect location to hold a market, along the front, next to the Old Market Hall. We bought some gorgeous strawberries from the market too.

From here, we hopped on a tram to Linnanmaki theme park. This was a great few hours out, and you could genuinely spend the whole day here. You could book this as one of the excursions with P&O, but we DIY’ed it. We hopped on a public tram which took us right outside the park and bought the tickets at the gate. Very easy public tram system to navigate and was cheap at approx £2pp.

I would definitely recommend arriving at the park early and heading straight to the big coasters, as by the time we were leaving, the queues for the big rides were approaching 60-80 minutes long.

From Linnanmaki, we took a walk around the back of the theme park and headed straight to the Olympic stadium & Football stadium, passing through some lovely green space and some artwork too. The stadiums were next to each other and there was a children’s tournament on when we visited, with countries entering from all over the world (safe to say the boys wanted to stay and watch part of a match!!).

From the stadium, we wandered over to see the Sibelius monument, in Sibelius park. There is lots of seating here and there were some vendors selling fresh fruit and juices. Lovely spot to sit and enjoy the quiet.

From here we jumped back on the tram and headed to Senate Square to see Helsinki Cathedral.

For such a busy square, we still managed to find some space to sit in a quaint little pop up bar, serving drinks and some snacks right in the square. It was lovely to take some time, to sit and enjoy and watch the world go by for a while. The boys had a lovely snack of waffles and strawberries with cream.

After spending way too much time people watching, we wandered back towards the waterfront and spent some time wandering along the front, admiring Uspenski Cathedral.

We ended the day by taking a ride on the big wheel at the waterfront, which gave some beautiful views over the city before heading to catch our shuttle bus back to the ship.

If you’d like more information about any of the destinations visited, or want to book your own cruise or holiday, please either comment on this blog, or you can contact me via my page Lisa Craddock Experience It Now Travel.