Alund — Jim Winslett

We were originally going to go to Helsinki (a city I love) but Putin screwed that up for us.

With Russia at war with Ukraine during our cruise, Viking (wisely) decided that going up into that dead-end Gulf of Finland for stops in Tallinn, Saint Petersburg, and Helsinki was a bad idea. If Russia launched ships into that gulf, we’d be stuck with no escape route.

So we ended up in Åland (AW-lond) which is an autonomous country with its own flag, its own parliament, its own internet extension (Åland website addresses end in .ax ), its own postal service, etc etc etc.

It’s an archipelago - a bunch of islands (more than 6500 of them!) though 90% of the population all live on one island, which we visited.

We docked next to the old customs house, which gave us our first glimpse of the Åland flag

Reminder that you can click any image and see it complete on your screen without scrolling

The flag is a mashup of the Blue/yellow Swedish flag with the red Finnish cross smacked on top. Because reasons.

Ålund is autonomous, but it’s technically part of the sovereignty of Finland… but the official language is Swedish. Go figure.

It’s known as the home of the Windjammers - a type of tall-mast sailing ship, one of which is docked right behind our ship

The bus tour took us to the highest mountain in Åland - a whopping 129m peak. You can see it in the picture above - that tower is on top of it.

t’s a water tower, but there are offices on top - and probably the lookout tower for the port as well (since I didn’t see any others)

The view from here is.. not bad.

From there, we did a bit of a drive around, stopping at a 12th century church for a photo op

Then to the maritime quarter for a bit of shopping and a washroom stop

The bus headed back to the ship from there, but we caught the free hop on/ hop off City Tåget (city train) into town

City centre is cute with some boutique shops

And a pizza ATM. No, really. The pizzas are made off-site and cooked to just short of done.

You order a slice from the ATM and it cooks the slice the rest of the way and it slides out of the ATM hot and ready.

City hall has a nice garden around it with a statue of Julius Sundblom (newspaper editor and politician)

The country is called “Land of 1000 Lindens” due to the huge number of Linden trees

And for some reason, it has a lot more classic cars than it probably ought to. Not sure why.

Gutter humour note: the harbour where we docked is the “ace harbour” - but ‘ace’ in Swedish looks a lot funnier. I almost bought a t-shirt with the harbour logo on it, but then figured I probably wouldn’t wear it anywhere.

Here’s the optimist’s office for the Ace Harbour. With the Swedish spelling.