Two Americans in Finland

We had a fun boat ride from Tallinn to Helsinki on Friday, and even managed to take out excellent seats at the front of the ship with a gorgeous view of the stunningly blue Bay of Finland and various land masses! 

Once we drove to Tampere (pronounced Tom'-pear-uh) we checked into the hotel and did the obvious geocacher thing: looked for caches.  Seemed lots of others had the same idea -- we found a couple of caches on our own, one with some Norwegians, one with cachers from the Czech Republic, saw some Danish cachers, etc.  At one point a cacher from somewhere in Eastern Europe chased us down, asked "you're from America? can you take this?" and handed us two travel bugs.  That scene would repeat itself on Saturday at the Mega Event.

The event itself was ok....it was fun to meet cachers from many places....and wonderful to connect with some of our European caching friends. We spoke with many cachers from Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Latvia and probably elsewhere. Needless to say, we got lots of comments about how far we are from home, and quite a few people pointed at their Oregon GPS units when they realized we were from Oregon.  If you believe the map on which people identified their home, we were half of the North Americans in attendance. The only caching we did was a boat trip to a nearby island with several caches of different types (most with 5-star terrain).  Our caching friends may be amused to learn that we actually found a multi-cache!

Yesterday was very nice. But it was today, Sunday, that was the amazingly awesome and memorable day spent caching with our German friend Andreas!  But since it's now 19:30 local time, we need to leave to go to dinner with a group of cachers....so will describe today's escapades later.