Way up north
One semester in Finland …

We just came back from a very nice 4 day trip together with another German girl, Andrea, and one Spanish guy, Saul. We started our trip in Turku at 7 p.m. taking the bus to the airport. We wanted to pick up our car there, but nobody was at the desk. So we called the number which was written on a paper and finally one person came (he expected us to come with the next flight). We guess he was a little bit out of his mind and so he forgot to charge us for the third driver and for being under 25 … good for us. As we had to wait for him he gave us a bigger car (double-upgrade) than we ordered and so we got a Mercedes B 180. So we started our at around 8.30 p.m. Around 12 hours later we arrived in Rovaniemi where we wanted to have breakfast in the most Northern McDonald’s in the world. But we were 45 minutes too early and it was closed. So we continued our way, stopped at the Santa Clause Village for a couple of minutes and arrived in Inari at around 1 o’clock in the afternoon.

Day 1
As we were hungry we went to Siida, the Sami museum to have lunch. After that we drove to our hostel in Kaamanen. There we had the possibility to get cross-country skis for free. The sizes of the shoes did not fit all of us so that we drove to the next “shop” 1.5km away to rent one more skis. In the evening we then had our first cross-country ski experience in Lapland. After that we drove to Inari to get some ice cream and relaxed at home. We went outside for a couple of times to see if we can see the Northern Lights, but as it was snowing so there was no chance to see them that night.

Day 2
We got up early because we wanted to drive to Norway and the arctic see on that day. The border to Norway was not very impressive, but the countryside changed completely. We drove along a very nice valley with little mountains and finally came to a point where we could see the arctic see. It wasn’t frozen and there were more snowy mountains around there. It was really nice to see. We then also saw reindeers in the countryside and fishing areas within the sea. We drove along the coastline for a while and enjoyed it a lot. Back in our hostel we cooked Spaghettis and decided to go out for cross-country skiing again. This itself was not a problem, but we decided to go into another direction than the day before. We were thinking that we were skiing on a lake, but later we found out that it was a river. As it started to get dark we decided to go away from the snowmobile tracks were you can easily ski and cross a few trees to get to the other side of the ‘lake’ and go back there. That was a bad decision. Once away from the track we sunk into the snow up to our hips. It was not possible to go on with the skis and we tried to crawl. It was really hard and took us hours. We finally made our way back to the hostel. This night we again drove the 60 km to Inari and back to get ice cream J. We furthermore had a look at the Inari lake in the night because we were hoping to have a better chance to see the Northern Lights from there. But even though we saw stars in this night we could not see anything else.

Day 3 and 4
It was a really nice and sunny day. We had to pack our stuff in the morning. After that we drove to the Inari lake to do cross-country skiing on it. It is amazingly big and really beautiful. At around 2 o’clock we again had lunch at the Sami museum. We than had to bring back our skis. On this way we saw a lot of reindeers. Some were lying on the river and others were standing on the street and not going away … But we then actually made our way and went into the museum we up to now just had lunch in. It was interesting and explained things about the Sami culture and the different animals and times of the year in that area. At around 6 we started our way back to Turku. On our way just a couple of kilometers before Ivalo we saw a wild spirit park. On a sign it said that it is open every day until 8. But another sign said closed and had a telephone number on it. Luckily we called that number and 10 minutes later a woman came. She kind of did a tour with us and showed us the 32 sled dogs (not many huskies) they had. She knew the name and race of every single dog and explained us a lot. She also showed us a raccoon-dog, a red fox, a polar fox, wild pigs, a ferret, etc. It was really cool! After that we continued our way back home. We always looked out of the car window to hopefully see some lights, but nothing. We arrived in Rovaniemi at 11:20 and now were early enough to have dinner at the McDonald’s before it closed at midnight. We went out further South and then finally saw some blue/green lights. We stopped at a lake to have it dark around us. And really, yes we could see some northern lights. But we have to say that they were not very bright or colorful this night and so it wasn’t really spectacular. After another long drive in the car we finally arrived Turku on Monday at midday.

In total we drove 3204 km which took us 42:37 hours.