Hope y'all don't mind if I share about our trip...

My son is a big hockey fan (thanks to his old man) and loves the Stars, even after moving to Colorado and having a gf who is a big Avs fan. He was super excited when this Global Series was announced, so we started looking into it.

Our rough itinerary was to leave DFW on Tuesday, arrive in Helsinki late Wednesday morning and spend the night there. Thursday afternoon to Friday afternoon - more details in a moment. The games were Friday and Saturday night in Tampere, a city about 1 hour NW of Helsinki. Finally, we'd take a train from Tampere to the Helsinki airport early Sunday morning.

Even though we knew how far north Helsinki was, it was still jarring at first to see the sun only reach 15 or 16 degrees above the horizon at most. Helsinki is a nice little city, pretty clean, and all of the people were exceptionally nice. Beautiful weather the first day there.



We wandered around on foot a bit, then took a ferry over to Fort Suomenlinna. This is the sun at 2:30pm - just crazy how low it was.





"King's Gate" - had a neat little drawbridge and gate inside the arch. The Baltic Sea / Gulf of Finland was cold!


About a decade ago, I worked with a Finn on a project and he was a great guy, so I reached out to him for info on anything we should see while over there. He wasn't having that. Instead, he wanted us to stay Thursday night with him and another friend at his cabin outside of Ahtari (another 2-2.5 hours by car north of Tampere). He has cabins and a smoke sauna the he and his dad built by hand from timbers harvested from their own land. He would drive us to Tampere Friday before the games.

One of the cabins:


We spent an hour or so drinking beers and some gin & grapefruit juice soda thing while touring the cabins and sauna. He started heating the sauna early that morning and put some salmon, potatoes, and a pork roast inside to cook for dinner. We ate dinner (so good!) with about 3 bottles of wine, then opened more beers while stripping down for the sauna. It was at this time my son asked me if I would be doing "the plunge". Yikes, that hadn't even occurred to me! So yes, we got buck naked, jumped into the freezing-cold lake (outside temp was below freezing). Then we went up to the sauna (176*F inside) to warm up. Repeat sauna, plunge, and beer drinking until 3:30am. At some point, my friend pulled out a nice bottle of Islay scotch.


Notice how there are frozen footprints on the dock from the night before.


Never try to keep up with Finns - they'll drink you under the table. We were very hungover the next day but eventually made it to the smaller city of Tampere late in the afternoon. Basically crashed at our Airbnb until it was time to head over to the game. I think we were a 1.2mi walk form the stadium, and the area received 4.5" of snow that morning. It was a treacherous walk at times.


Our seats for the first game were 4 rows behind the end of the Panthers bench.


For the second game, were were second-to-last row of the upper level.


Beer + hockey = heaven.


Yeah the game results weren't what we wanted, but we had a great time and met some very cool Finns (even those who wore red were awesome).


The weather definitely impacted our travel back to the US, but no biggie.


all in all, we had a great time - trip of a lifetime!

Thanks so much for sharing the pictures and details of the trip! Sounds like it was a great experience and a memory you and your son will treasure.

Razor mentioned that multiple people recognized him while walking around town. Did you see many other fans who traveled from Texas?

We saw a lot of people walking around Helsinki and Tampere wearing Stars stuff. Our flights and trains were packed with Texans. Saw only 1 person wearing Panthers gear. But the arena was pretty much 50/50 for the games.

I left out that the anthems before game 1 were exceptional. Diandra (Finnish pop star) did an awesome job with the Star-Spangled Banner, but hearing the whole crowd sing along with the Finnish anthem gave me chills up and down my spine. The Finns are a proud people and they hate Russia and Sweden.

It's time for the Stars to find a new singer, and I say that as someone who really enjoyed Celina Rae in the past - her time is just up.

What an absolute gem of a trip!

I noticed how good the crowd sounded during the Finish anthem for game 1. Very jealous of the experience.

After the second game we went to a small bar just down the street from the arena. Met a couple Stars fans from Dallas and joined a table with some Finns from Tempere.

Ended up bar hoping until 4:00 am with that group. Got all of their contact info. They said they'll definitely be coming to a Stars game after hanging out with people from DFW that weekend.

We had lots of Finns randomly coming up to talk to us and buying us shots that night.

Second time I've been to Finland and I really enjoy it there.