Well, earlier today it was time for the very first tour of Summer 2008. And for our very first updated A Taste of Porvoo and Countryside tour. We had actually done this tour a couple of times last year to test it out with some willing research subjects, but this was the Real Thing. And as such a bit intimidating.

Porvoo in May is still a very quite place. In a few more weeks the streets of the Old Town will be full of people come to admire this picturesque little town, but today, despite the awesome weather, it was still very uncrowded.

The reparations at the Porvoo Cathedral were a lot further ahead that what I would have thought, but then again it’s supposed to be opened again for the public in December just in time for the bicentennial anniversary of the Porvoo Diet. There is again a roof over the church and even the shingles are in place. A very Finnish smell of tar was hanging around the air was we were touring around the Cathedral.

In town I noticed that my favourite eatery the Old Town Café was newly renovated, and boasted a updated menu as well. While our guests explore Porvoo on their own, I had a wonderful bowl of tomato and goat cheese soup, the best I’ve had in ages. After the wonders of Porvoo had been seen (and tasted, you can’t forget the local chocolates!), we moved further east and deep into the Finnish countryside.

At the country wine they were celebrating the ten year anniversary of wine making by having a really big party with all kinds of things to nibble and explore. And with a donkey, too. I’m really upset that I didn’t have a camera with me so that I could have taken a picture of Linda the Donkey, 21 year-old! She was the favourite of the kids and quite obviously basked in the light of their adoration. And, of course, there was wine and jelly tasting, which were just as tasty and sweet as previously. Or even slightly better.

All in all, it was a gorgeous day!

Tomorrow is the official start of our summer season!

Our summer tours this year include the popular Turku & Archipelago Experience, updated Porvoo tour called A Taste of Porvoo and Countryside, which besides Porvoo visits the small country town of Elimäki, and the new evening tour we’re calling A Finnish Summer evening. The evening tour is design to give travelers a taste of the Finnish summer cottage culture with some walking in the forest, sausage barbecue and sauna and swimming. This tour was designed almost completely based on feedback we got last year from passengers on what Finnish things they would like to experience. So, a big thank you to everyone of summer 2007 tours who chatted with us on!

At the height of the summer season we will be running five regular tours a week, as well as some private tours for groups. Rudolf’s will indeed be busy this summer, which of course is a really, really good thing!

The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing nothing else but trying to scramble my brain for what all the things I need to do and remember in order to be ready for the new summer season. I’ve gone down from having a to-do list a mile long to just few points here and there being open. I think it’s safe to say that we are ready for the Summer 2008!

The Great Rudolf Flyer Run 2008 Part I now done. I’ve visited most of the over fifty places I had marked down for myself on a what turned out to be a very cramped and colourful map of central Helsinki. It was quite of an interesting operation in more ways than one.

I got a whole range of different responses from the places I visited. Some were very excited tell me that this was exactly the kind of service they had been waiting for (small, friendly day tours design for international travelers). Some were only lukewarm. And on some cases I know that our brochures will disappear out of sight just as soon as I’ve turned my back (they are heavily in bed with the opposition, you see).

Logistically it was also a bit of a nightmare as hotels/hostels ect. are strewn all over town. For the Great Rudolf Flyer Run 2008 Part II I must figure out some other way of doing this than trying visit them all by car. Perhaps hiring a bicycle might be in order.

So, now that our summer flyers have arrived from the printers it’s time to think about how to get them around to all the places our potential customers might be looking for them.

I’ve spent a good deal of the day listing every single accommodation provider in Helsinki and marking them down with little red dots on my Helsinki city map. So far, I have 51 dots. And I’m sure I’m missing a few. Next thing is not figure out how on earth am I going to visit them all …

PS. If you’d like to take a look at the Summer 2008 flyer: here it is!

I’d had the flyer sitting patiently on my computer’s hard drive for a few months now waiting for little details to be ironed out so it could be sent to the printers. Well, the details were sorted out, and I sent it off. After proof-reading and spotting a few obligatory spelling mistakes it was ready to face the world and spread the gospel of Rudolf’s excellent days tours.

Enter Murphy’s Law. The thousands of flyers have been printed and were sitting in the warehouse waiting to be picked up, and what happens? Sh*t happens. One of the service providers we were going to use this summer had a change of heart, and now the tour we were doing with them is Bye! Bye! Bye! (Excuse me, I was an N*sync fan once upon a time.)

So, flyers end up in waste basket, and new flyers need to printed. If only they had had their change of heart a week earlier, and I could have avoided massacring a bunch of trees. (Sorry trees!)

Well, at least now we have flyers that are accurate and spell mistake free. If they are not spell mistake free, can you guess who doesn’t want to know?

I’ve been busy at work trying to plan the Lapland Adventures for winter of 2009. The travel business is a strange business. We’ve only just come back from the Lapland tour, and the season is still going strong up in Lapland, and now I’m trying to find out how much things will cost in 2009.

We’re trying very hard to keep the tour as affordable as possible, but it’s turning out to be easy. One of the providers is raising their prices with 20%, and while most are more conservative than that keeping the costs down for next year is going to be a struggle.

You might think that since next year we’re running more tours and hoping to have more people on them:

More tours + more people on tours = better offers from service providers.

Only not. If I was basing my estimation on inflation rate in Finland on the offers I’ve received this week, I would think that inflation was galloping a whooping 10% annually, and not 3% like the Bank of Finland tells us. Well, I guess I’ll just have to keep on haggling with them. Not that us Turku people are very good at that art, but no time to learn like the present, right?

Yesterday we had the pleasure of touring with the some curlers (or should I say curling players?). The week Vierumäki Sport Academy is hosting the World Championship Curling for Seniors’ and Women. And we had the chance to take some of the Canadian curling players and their families on a tour around Southern Finland.

Vierumäki is pretty much in the middle of nowhere (anyone living in Lahti has to forgive me but Lahti, which is the only city close by is not exactly an exciting metropol. Or exciting anything. Unless you like ski jumping and want to see exactly how high the ski jump towers are, but that’s a different story), so they hadn’t had a chance to experience much of Finland yet. Well, that problem was fixed by us taking them for a tour to see some Finnish towns and countryside as well as to find out a bit about what’s it like to live in this Arctic country.

We started by visiting Porvoo, which at this time of the year is just unbelievably quiet and tranquil. In the height of the summer Porvoo is buzzing with tourists and life, but not so much yesterday. We walked around the Old Town and talked about the old days in this once busy trading town. Some Porvoo specialities were also tasted at the suberb Little Chocolate Factory and I know that some on the tour also tried the authentic Porvoo dessert (or should I say breakfast), the Runeberg tart.

After Porvoo we headed towards the East (not all the way to Russia but) to Elimäki. Where we took them to experience some Finnish country wines made of Finnish berries and fruits. We had a few tastings of the wines as well as some awesome jams and jellies. And I know that a few bottles of wine and jams found their way back to Vierumäki. Who knows they might have gone all the way back to Canada!

Curling teams and Maija at the winery

We at Rudolf home that they’ll have a grand old time in Finland and win many gold metals on the way!

PS. I’ve heard that the Canada brought home all the gold metals from the games. Congratulations!

Today was our very first Turku & Archipelago Experience tour since late December. During 2008 were we first on holiday in New Zealand (yay!) and then we had the Lapland Adventure to keep us busy. And we couldn’t have done this tour even if we had wanted to since our special lunch place was also on a well deserved holiday for two months.

It was great to get back into the saddle, so to speak. I must admit that the first time I took the microphone started to talk about what we were going to do on the day, I was a bit worried if I would recall all the things I used to say. But it went fine. It was also wonderful to visit our lunch place in Archipelago. After not being able to enjoy their mouthwatering dishes since Christmas, it was very enjoyable to enjoy their home cheese (personal favourite) and other delicacies with our guests.

And, of course, having some curious and good humoured guests on the tour made the whole experience a very enjoyable one! So, thank you our guests for sharing a day with us, and listening to me babbling on about the weird Finns with just enthusiasm!

Today was the last day of the Lapland Adventure. We started off super early so that those who had booked the cruise on the Sampo ice breaker would get to Kemi in time for this Arctic Adventure. While they were off playing with a huge piece of machinery and floating in the ice, the rest of us enjoyed a very Finnish thing: the mobile phone throwing Championship, where Jason and Rachel were crowned the Grand Champions.

On the last day we also visited the Kemi Snow Castle, which was a lot bigger than I recalled. Too bad nowadays all the programs there are for kids. It would have been nice to spent our last night in Lapland listening to some live music in the Snow Castle.

We had our farewell dinner at an excellent Vietnamese restaurant in town before heading to the train back to Helsinki. On the train some … odd things went on and some people may or may not have gotten hitched in a very colourful … ceremony.

All in all the Lapland tour has gone much better than I thought. The people have been amazing and it’s been loads of for me. There were a couple of hiccups on the way, but in the end it was small potatoes. Thank you all for making this an experience to remember!

After a most peculiar night in the Snow Hotel we headed towards Sweden and border town village of Muonio. There we went to first meet huskies and then for a very speedy sled ride with them. It was quite amazing to watch the huskies as the sleds were being prepared to go out. They were all so super excited about the chance to go for a good run that they were jumping up and down, some of them even howling like wolves!

The ride itself was super beautiful but cold even with all the extra gear on we were give. After the husky ride there was something quite different in the program: winter touch rugby on the ice. I never realised just how hard it is to run in the snow before! After an hour of game I was just dead. We played New Zealand vs. The rest of the World, and to my sorrow I must say that the Kiwis beat us (but only by a cat’s hair).

In the evening we took full advantage for the bar at our accommodation and arranged an hilarious Air Guitar Championship. The Grand Champion in this tight competition was Dean with his amazing version of Lordi’s Hard Rock Hallelujah.