A trip to Lappi and Sammallahdenmäki

A few weeks ago, my allergies were killing me.  I had heard, once upon a time, that eating local honey helps with allergies, because it has all the local pollen in it.  Makes sense, right? So I made Stephen get a ride to work, picked up some of the other wives, and we drove out to Lappi, about 15km to the east.

Polar-Honey Finland collects honey in Western Finland and north into the Arctic.  They sell mostly at festival-type markets in Finland and Germany, but they have a store in Lappi.  I bought some Arctic Honey, some Vanilla Honey (which I think will be great on top of ice cream), some Buckwheat Honey (fabulous on top of pancakes), and some very good mustard with horseradish.

After tasting many types of honey, we bought our honey and moved on to our next stop – Sammallahdenmäki.  Sammallahdenmäki is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, although some people might consider it “a bunch of piles of rocks.”  It’s a group of burial cairns, laid out over about a kilometer.  The burial mounds are from the Bronze Age (1500-500BC), and at that time this area was on an inlet of the Baltic Sea.  I won’t go into the historic detail of the site, you can read about it at the link above, but I will say it was quite interesting.  Later in the summer, there is a guide who can tell visitors much more about the site than what we could see walking around, so I intend to go back!

Looks like just a pile of rocks, right?

But you can see that these were placed with intention.

After walking through Sammallahdenmäki, we stopped at what we thought was a cafe nearby.  Well, they did have some lunch items, but it turned out to be a butcher shop.  So, now we all know where to get fresh meat nearby!  We had some lunch, and I had to try something called a Rio Rita – non-alcoholic, I swear!  See the label below:

“Squash Drink” – Tasted kind of like a Fresca.