Come to Seili, they said. It will be beautiful at this time of year, they said. It’s just some flights from Canberra to Helsinki, a bus trip to Turku (a lovely little town on the west coast of Finland) and then an easy ferry ride to the island.

So the flights were fine, even though Qantas tried to make me miss the ferry at this end by cancelling the Sydney – Singapore flight on Sunday night (they did a good job of rerouting and I even got enough time for a taro pie in Singapore). And the bus trip was uneventful (although I slept through most of it on account of feeling terribly motion sick). An evening in Turku was pleasant, if you ever find yourself in the vicinity, the restaurant Smör was lovely and gambling on the fish of the day (gambling because I really didn’t want herring) was well worth it.

But then Wednesday morning dawned. And we unsuspectingly went to the ferry dock.  It was a lovely little ferry, possibly not the size we were expecting given the number of people who attend Glottobank meetings, but it was a lovely morning, looked calm, if not a little overcast.

The dog was a little nervous about the trip, we should have taken notice, but there were important tasks, like loading the sauna beers onto the boat. Just for reference here’s a couple more before photos…

For the first hour or so of the trip it was a beautiful trip through the archipelago, for those of you who aren’t sure exactly where that is, it’s about here,

which doesn’t seem like it should take that long to get to, but surprisingly, there is a lot of water in Finland, around 188, 000 lakes, which is just insane. And from personal experience, I now know that it gets quite rough.  And that the ferry wasn’t big enough for everyone to get inside and be under cover. And that the Baltic Sea is quite wet and at this time of year quite cold.  Especially with a northerly wind. In fact, it’s about this wet…

Outi, our Finnish host, had been quite adamant about wet weather gear. I’d taken it half seriously and at least had a waterproof jacket and hiking boots. Unfortunately that doesn’t help much when you have water crashing over your head, running down the back of your jacket on the inside and into your boots. And it doesn’t help when Outi says ‘Look! The island is just ahead of us!’ at precisely the right moment for a wave to smash into the upturned faces of all of those on the back deck.

But we arrived, eventually, sodden and frozen, luckily we’d had some forethought and bought whiskey in Turku.  The ex-mental asylum/leper colony we’re staying in is now a research station for biologists/ecologists from the University of Turku. So our clothes are still drying in a cabinet that is normally used to dry algae samples. Maybe tomorrow my boot swill be dry!!