Day 7: Fast Forward

The online photo collection, which will be updated periodically, can be found here.

Well, what else are you going to do when you’re on a plane for eight-and-half hours?

Apologies for the large gap in posts, but it’s hard to be posting updates for someone else’s travels. Plus, I am far from qualified to be giving you any kind of insight on the details of Mary Beth’s conference. Basically, once the meetings got past the cornhead stage, I was out of my depth.

But after a week of eating peanut butter from the jar, it was finally time for me to join Mary Beth in Finland. I spent the better part of Wednesday morning puttering around the house, checking and double-checking everything I had packed before my mother came to pick me up at 10:30 for my 1:00 flight.

Unfortunately, the one thing I didn’t double-check was my actual flight. As I was getting ready to go, I finally took a close look at the boarding pass I had printed the night before—which told me that my flight boarded at 11:15.

As Rick Perry would say, oops.

We had a, shall we say, tension-filled drive from my house to Eppley Airfield, which ended with an elderly representative of airport security scolding my mother for driving too fast in the passenger drop-off zone. Those of you fortunate enough to have met my mother will appreciate the dichotomy of her being treated as a scofflaw—although I wouldn’t have wanted to be that security agent with the look my mother shot him.

Remarkably, I made it to my flight with time to spare. Thankfully, no one had me listed as “Carsten” or “Philomena” or any name other than the one actually on my passport, so I was able to board the plane to Helsinki without incident.

When I flew home from Seattle, I had some disturbing swelling in my legs, which put me in the distressing position of being advised to wear compression socks for the flight. I waited until I had boarded the plane, until the last possible moment, to put the compression socks on—evidently I have at least a few scraps of pride remaining.

The flight was uneventful, allowing me to get caught up on a little reading and watch the remake of RoboCop (how a movie with a cast that includes Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, and Jackie Earl Hailey could be so profoundly silly is beyond me). But I do realize how poorly I have planned my flying.

As I understand it, the way to avoid jet lag is to sleep at the normal times when you arrive at your destination. My flight left Chicago at 3:45, and was just over an eight hour flight. That puts me into Helsinki at 12:30 a.m. my time. Unfortunately, that’s 8:30 a.m. in Finland, the very start of the day.

So, unless I got some shut-eye on the flight (which given the quality of the movie I chose might have been a better option anyway), I’m going to end up pulling an all-nighter for my first day in Finland. What could go wrong?

Helsinki finally arrived, and I had a little less than an hour to get through customs and make my flight to Joensuu. I hoofed it as fast as I could through the Helsinki airport, trying desperately to not be the ugly American and observe that the rounded edges, tidy compartments and light wood façade made the design of the airport look like an Ikea store.

Upon finding the gate for Joensuu (which was, natch, on the other side of the freaking airport), I asked the gate attendant if I was in the right place. It was at that point I realized I was, in fact, the ugly American. Even though I had known for months of this trip, I had not mastered even the basics in Finnish conversation. 

Thankfully, the gate attendant was terribly nice and spoke English, so I was able to realize I was in the right place, board my prop plane, and head for Joensuu.

Almost immediately after the plane left the ground, my whole “pull and all-nighter plan” went awry, as I fell asleep. I woke up just about when the plane landed, and made my way off the plane and into the tiny little airport in Joensuu. Mary Beth was waiting there for me, which was about as welcome a sight as I can remember.

We got my bag, and she pointed me in the direction of the airport shuttle to get us back to the hotel—let me tell you, jet lag is a real thing, and at that point I’m not certain I was capable of much in my condition. After a quick shower at our hotel (the Sokos Vakuuna), we took a little walk around for me to get the lay of the land.

We had a really good pizza for lunch, although when accounting for the time difference I realized I was having lunch at about three in the morning on Omaha time. Not that it would be the first time for me to consume pizza at that hour, but it did seem a bit odd. We walked through the open-air market across the street from the hotel, coming across a guy from Tallahassee running a BBQ who seemed very excited to talk with other Americans. I’ll have to go back and ask him if he took that rig to tailgate before a Seminoles game.

We returned to the hotel and formally blew up my anti-jet-lag plans, napping for a few hours before moving on to our evening’s events.