74.16km –11H09’
Altitude : 55 m
Our day could be have the title « it must be beautiful here when the sun is shining»
This time we have not escaped the rain, which has been falling all day. Serge looks like a little duck and as is always the case when it rains all day, our runner doesn’t mope but keeps his even disposition. It’s not a great day because he still has some physical problems: the dormant pain in the pubis and knee, which he treats by taking 2 Propofan (an analgesic). He tells me that most probably he will now have to live with the problem to the end of the race.
René is not in top form this morning, he who is in good health after a total of 200 days on the race, and Eliane is always her same dynamic self. As for me, I took my second late morning in less than a week; not getting up until 8H00 AM and only hearing in the distance the departure of the dream team at 6H35.
This Whit Monday, the shops are open and children are in school. The rain doesn’t discourage the “towheads” from taking their bike, with their back satchel. Rain does not seem to make any change in the routine of the Finns, who are used to long, severe winters. I have finally understood the reason for the electric outlets that you can see everywhere, in parking lots, and even in people’s gardens. Cars are fitted with an electric cable which can be plugged into these outlets in order to maintain the inside heat during the cold winter.
We are going up along the left bank of the Kemijoki River, which flows into the Baltic Sea at Kemi, which is nestled in a cover on the Golf of Botnia. The major European road, E75, which also has the number 4, is on the right bank. We chose the tranquility of route 926, on which we will reach Rovaniemi tomorrow. After Kemi, the 3 bridges which we have seen and which link the two banks have been built on hydro-electric dams, whose turbines spew the water with great force.
After Rovaniemi, we originally planned to head directly west toward Sweden but the call of the North is stronger than ever for Serge, and we are going to go deeper into “Lapland,” Finnish Lapland. We will take the only available itinerary, the famous 75, to go from city to city: Sodankyla, Ivalo, Inari, Karigasniemi (the city on the border of Finland and Norway. So we will make a foray of 200 km outside the borders of the European Union, since Norway is not one of the 27 member states. Then it will be time for us to head south.
Lastly, in yesterday’s pictures, we had doubts about the beasts René saw: were they perhaps reindeer rather than elk.
Town : route 996