The journey over was pretty interesting. First, I met my good friend and teammate Scott Power (Linebacker Hanover College) who will be my sidekick through these Finland adventures waiting to get on the plane in Cincinnati. He played with me during our junior and senior seasons at Hanover. We will be the only American players playing for the Turku Trojans. So it will be nice to have one of my good friends with me. It will be the first time out of the country for the both of us. He flew to Cincinnati from Indianapolis. We had to wait 45 minutes to get on the flight. We got on the smallest plane I have ever been on. Scott and I were jammed in the same row. Nonetheless we made it into NYC. We flew over the city and it is HUGE compared to any other city I have seen. In the Indy and Cincy airports there are just 3 terminals (A,B,C), but the JFK airport in NY has 9 terminals! If we wouldn't have asked someone where we were suppossed to go after we got off the plane we may still be in NYC.
The worst part was the layover in NYC, where we had to sit for 5 hours to wait for our flight into Helsinki, Finland (Finland's capital). We sat in a food court and watched some guy walk around and ask people for money while he handed out American flag pins and said that he was deaf and going blind. We watched him make about 25 bucks in 15 minutes walking around the food court. Then he came back 2 hours later and did it again to make some more money. It was ridiculous, and he probably made over $500 that day just begging for some money. We finally got up and decided that it was time to go to our gate, on our way I looked up and was like, "whoa, there's Bill Walton" and he was walking tall with his patented tie-dyed T-shirt on and I basically rubbed shoulders with him, it was pretty cool.
Once we got on the plane we had another hour wait and this plane was huge with 3 aisles and movie screens. The company was Finnair. There was one movie in English but I didn't recognize it, but the coolest part of it was that everyonce in a while they showed us a map of what we were flying over so we could follow where we were, what we were flying over, and how far we had to go. The flight was about 7 hours 30 minutes not counting the hour delay before we left the ground. Whenever the pilot would come on the loud speaker he would speak in Finnish first and then in English, but the Finnish part was always way longer that the English part. They served us dinner on the flight it was okay, but nothing special. I probably got about 3 and a half hours of sleep on the plane.
We arrived in the Helsinki airport and had no idea where to go. So we eventually followed the exit signs and ran into customs. We went to a window with a big guy with a shaved head. He checked our passports and asked us what we were doing in the country, we said playing football, and he asked if we had any proof. We said no but we have a telephone number. Of course he tried to call the number and no one answered, so he took us into this waiting/questioning room. We were a little worried. No not really, but I thought the player that was suppossed to be picking us up would have left by the time we got out of there. I thought that every security guard that walked past us was going to stop and say that we were okay to go through, but they didn't. Finally after 20 minutes or so the shaved head man came back and said they still couldn't get a hold of anyone. Son of a ... Then someone walked in and said, "Hi, I'm Thomas, I'm the player that is picking you up." So we were relieved when he showed up.
Then we got our first taste of the Finnish language first hand. The security guy came back and spoke to Thomas and they were flying! Scotty and I just looked at each other. But they said we were fine and could go through. Now it was time to get our luggage and of course we were the only ones left to pick up our luggage. One of my bags came right out and 2 of Scott's came out ... but no more. So Scott and I both had a bag missing and mine was the one with all my clothes and helmet in it. So we filled out a report and they spoke some more Finnish to each other and they said our luggage was going to be here in the next few days because they got left back in New York. Scott pointed out that they only had about 6 hours to transfer our bags which should have been plenty of time. This was only the beginning of the longest day of my life .... Day 1.