Yesterday was an exhausting day. I set out from Oulu at 11am and followed E75 for a while, which was bad enough.
The ‘funny’ thing with Finish cycle lanes is that they are not very well sign-posted, that is, there are pretty much no signs telling me where a particular cycle path leads to. And while they usually follow a major road, their direction is not always obvious at junctions where they sometimes lead through tunnels underneath the road.
Anyway, I left E75 and turned north at Simo, to sample some of the wilderness of Northern Finland. I cycled on gravel tracks and did soon have to fight with the wildest and fiercest of Scandinavia’s inhabitants – mosquitoes. And a hell of a lot of them. I was quite unprepared for their onslaught when three spokes snapped in quick succession and I had to stop to install replacements. I put on almost all the clothes I had to cover up everything except my hands. Pitching tent in the evening was a similarly adventurous endeavor.
Today, then, I joined road no. 4 somewhere south of Rovaniemi, stopped there for lunch and to buy mosquito repellent, and continued north. Road no. 4 is the one I will follow up to Ivalo and a little bit beyond, that is, for the next 200 kilometers.
I pitched tent just a few meters off the road, behind some bushes, deep in mosquito territory.
Cycled: 176km
