Polar Challenge Blog

Our last night at the North Cape was a rather wet and windy affair with rain all through the night. We awoke bright and early to the sound of a Bond Bug being started up as Richard left camp early to go into the town to have his radius arm welded as it had broken away from the chassis. Geoff and I left before everyone else to go into a local gift shop that was packed with a couch load of tourist all buying stuff that they really didn’t want or need buy just did so as it had a picture of the North Cape on it.

Our plan today was to take the “easy” route home by driving through Finland and down. As we arrived in Finland, Geoff and I were pulled over by Customs, they asked if we had anything to declair but I had a feeling that they just wanted to look at the car as they all came out to look. What they didn’t bank on was four Bond Bugs then stopping behind me as well. That really shocked them and the conversation then turned to one about the cars and asking wehere we had driven from. I say it every day but in Europe, the car, really is the star.
Being close to the Russian border we took a slight detour to see if they would let us in so that we could say they we had driven through Russia as well. As we pulled up to the border, we went inside and asked if we could go in, turn the car around and come back out again. “No” was the answer. We had all the necessary paper work but did not have a Russian visa and withoiut that they would not let us in. having said that, they were very friendly and all came out to look at the cars, including a chap with a labrador who no doubt was sniffing each car just incase we had anything dodgy on board. They let us take photos though that surprised me and as I turned New Blue around, I managed to get her nose under the barrier … so the front end was in Russia and the back end in Finland.

Passing into Finland also meant going into a new time zone so we are now two hours ahead rather than one.

The camp site today is set in the middle of the woods near a lake and is like a postcard, though there are lots lof little monsters flying about and trying to eat Geoff. I’m guessing they only like stale meat as I haven’t been bitten yet …

Elvis.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 10:43 pm and is filed under The Journey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.