From Helsinki we fast>>forwarded ourselves to Rovaniemi in Lapland with one of the best night trains...
https://youtu.be/VJTSZaitMBcHoping to get a bit ahead of the mosquitoes and curious to pass midsummer north of the Polar circle, we took the wonderful night train to Rovaniemi, arrives at 11:00 - ideal for people who like to sleep late and to have comfortable beds! After a day of visiting Rovaniemi, with Arktikum Museum on the Arctic Nature and Culture we crossed the polar circle in the evening and started a very very long day....
Our stops included Kemijärvi, Pyhä-Luosto Nationalpark, where we spent Midsummer at a wonderful camping site right by Pyhäjärvi (lake Pyhä), with fire, life dance music and real Finnish sauna. When we left the dance floor to crawl into our tent, a young woman asked: "Why are you leaving already? You were our favorite dance couple". Next was Sodankylä, where we coincided with a lot of Germans in old vehicles, on a rally from Hamburg: 7500km in 2 weeks, have to reach North cape, pass through Russia at some point and do a lot of additional quizzes and tasks on the way in a vehicle that is at least 20 years old; someone sponsors this and money is raised for social and environmental projects; we had some doubts on the effectiveness of the approach....
Next we camped wild, as it had rained most of the day and we started too late to reach a camping site, at a lake shore next to a Cafe, which allowed for a nice start with freshly brewed coffee. Here we met Aurimas from Lithuania, who is on a four months cycling trip in through Scandinavia and Germany. He documents his trip very professionally. Whenever we spoke about something he considered of interest to his followers, he asked permission to tape us and we surely appeared in some of his very impressive you tube videos, you can check them out under https://youtu.be/VJTSZaitMBc.
We spent a night with 'sauna and all' at a beautiful little campsite (they also run a small hostel at very reasonable prices) just south of Saariselkä. In Inari we visited the truly outstanding SIIDA Museum, where we learned a lot about Sami history and present situation and took a boat tour on lake Inari, the second largest lake in Finland, whose shoreline is 3000 km long!
Two consecutive nights of wild camping and a lot of cycling brought us to Kirkenes, Norway. When we passed the Finnish-Norwegian border we had cycled a total of 10.005 km.