Ferry Cross the Baltic

This is not my ferry. Mine is a lot bigger. The size of a cruise ship. And, even if it were, how would I have gotten that angle?

As many vacations as I have been taken, I have never taken a cruise vacation. In all my vacations, the most time I have ever spent on a boat/ship/floating vessel on a vacation was four or five hours (on a ferry from Sitka to Juneau, Alaska). This would blow that out of the water, so to speak. I was going to spend a total of 17 and one-half hours on a cruise vacation.

This is the ferry: the M/S Gabriella:

This is the Gabriella docked at the Viking terminal in the Södermalm section (island) of the City of Stockholm. I about to embark on the longest cruise vacation of my life.

This is the view of Djurgården, where I had spent the previous day at the Vasa Museum.

In fact, you can see the Vasa Museum very clearly on the left side of the photo below. On the right is a permanent amusement park, Gröna Lund.

I call it permanent because it is open year to year, although not year round. Carnies don't tear it down at the end of the week and move it to the next Scandinavian capital. Even though it closes for the "season," meaning when the days are so short you can hardly call them "days," it is closed, to re-open only whether the weather and length of daylight so justify.

And where is my next destination? Where will I be disembarking at the end of my nearly-a-whole-day cruise vacation fun?

Helsinki, Finland! The flag of Finland flying on the deck of the M/S Gabriella is the giveaway.

The first part of the journey -- and it's a long part -- is through the whole of the Stockholm archipelago:

Stockholm is a series of hundreds of islands stretching to the Baltic Sea.

It's very green.

And there are lots of other boats.

Of all shapes and sizes.

Selfie:

Selfie in a reflective pane of glass.

The dinner buffet was large and rather tasty. You can tell that you are at a buffet in a Nordic country because the buffet featured seven different kinds of pickled herring dishes. You think I'm exaggerating? I could be understating it. It could've been eight. But there were a minimum of seven. I tried one. It was supposedly with some kind of cheese. But the cheese did not taste like cheese. It tasted like fishy herring.

Anyway, I woke up in the morning after a decent night's sleep in my cabin, and saw this.

We were being tailed by a ferry from a competing cruise ship line

And the ferry was a cruise ship. It went on for a more complete Baltic cruise from Helsinki. I sprung for a room with a window. I thought I took pictures of my room, but I didn't. The room was small. About the size of many European hotel rooms in which I have stayed over the years.

After the breakfast buffet, we were soon entering the harbor of Helsinki.

And soon we arrived at marina.

This is a signature view of Helsinki. The "sky wheel" in the foreground. The Helsinki Cathedral (not a real cathedral) (Lutheran) with its green domes in the background.

When I see a city has one of these giant ferris wheels, I think that episode of "The Simpsons" with the monorail salesman, with Phil Hartman voicing the high-pressure monorail salesman pitching the monorail to the Simpsons' Springfield. I imagine that the salesmen pitching these large ferris wheel projects to various cities -- Las Vegas, London, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Helsinki -- use the same high pressure pitch as the Phil Hartman voiced salesman did in The Simpsons. And they are just as successful. And these giant ferris wheels are just as useful as the Springfield monorail. Ferris-wheel. Ferris wheeeeeel. Ferris-wheel.

Soon we were docked at the Helsinki harbor.

And soon I was walking in Helsinki to my hotel. Finland is now the 37the country that I visited. I might add one more this trip. We'll see how it goes.