AAfter a long week of work (about 45hrs, including half of Saturday) we decided to have a nice relaxed weekend...not! Mid-afternoon on Saturday, we set off with a day's worth of food (more on that) and camping gear. We had planned out a route mostly on back roads for the afternoon and the following day, and since we didn't have a map, we wrote out a cue sheet with road names, distances etc. We rode about 20km, almost all on dirt roads, to a trailhead called Pirunkirkko, which translates as Devil's Church. Actually, according to one of the guys at the farm, Jussi, Pirun was actually a pre-Christian pagan god, but they all get translated as devil in English. Kirkko, a rare cognate?, means church. We left our bikes locked to a tree in the woods, and immediately the mosquitos attacked. Well, Adie, at least. So, with long layers and bug headnets, we rigged up our panniers as back-and-front-packs and set off.
Unfortunately at this point the camera battery died. We continued up the trail, which climbs to the top of the rock formation. It was quite a magical landscape; ecological succession in action! Bare rock ceding to lichen, moss, blueberry, then in more established spots, shrubs and trees. We decided to camp up there. Finding a flat spot with deep enough soil to put tent stakes in turned out to be a challenge! We cooked dinner, pasta with tomato sauce...enough to pretty much fill our 1.5 liter cooking pot. Well, we could eat the leftovers for breakfast, we thought. Jetboil, the stove company (incidentally, founded in Hanover, NH), calls this their "group cooking system" but clearly they haven't spent enough time with touring cyclists (or farm workers), because we surprised ourselves and ate all of it! We got in bed around 8pm to read and sleep, but it felt like morning as the sun had just come out from behind the clouds. In the summer here, the only time it's dark is when it's cloudy. We slept well on our 6" thick bed of moss, which was especially convenient because Adie's sleeping pad had a slow leak and was entirely flat by midnight.
The next morning we packed up and decided to try the camera again. We tried the trick of rubbing the camera battery vigorously, which won us an extra couple of shots before the camera really died. This captures a bit of the variety of mosses around.
After hiking out, we returned to our bikes to complete the route we had planned. Unfortunately the back roads we had purposely selected turned out to be a bit too "back" for our tastes, or at least for Lucy's tire size! So we backtracked and took a gamble on some roads half-remembered from google maps the day before. Thankfully it worked out, and after 10km or so we found ourselves back on route. The day was spent riding mostly on dirt roads that exist almost exclusively to serve Finland's many lakeside summer cottages. Most Finnish families have a cottage where they spend several weeks in the summer, and we are in one of the regions most popular for these cabins.
We also discovered that, for a flat country, Finland really isn't flat. Like, not at all. Adie's theory: in most parts of the world, the topography is mainly dictated by uplifted mountains and eroding stream beds. Roads, by and large, follow these stream beds as a path of least resistance, with the occasional pass to hop from one valley to the next. Not so in Finland. There isn't much more than 150 feet between the lowest and highest parts of the land here, partly because the land is still rebounding from the weight of the Laurentian ice sheet. So the road builders just go wherever, which means a lot of up and down. Small hills, but constant hills. Lucy adds: the roads we were on mostly serve summer cottages on the lakesides. There were a lot of lakes, on both sides of the road, so the road would wend from one lake to the next, crossing over the ridge of higher land separating the lakes each time.
The second half of the day was a bit of a struggle (at least for Adie!). To eat, we had a couple of apples, leftover bell peppers and carrots, a jar of jam, some crackers, crunchy muesli (aka granola) and mixed nuts. Breakfast, lunch and all the snacks in between were composed of various combinations of these ingredients. After about 100km, the bulk of it on dirt, we finally made it back to Rihuntie, the road where the farm is, but we had neglected to note how far we had to go on that road. Turns out it was 10km. Adie spent the entire time drafting behind Lucy. Maybe it was the food, maybe it was the week working in the fields.
And this was supposed to be our rest day...
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