31 Juli 2007

Scandinavia Part II: Finnmark

hi again and a very warm welcome to the second part of my scandinavia-report - although i know very well, that i'm already a bit late. but since i have a lot of things going on at the moment i didn't find enough time yet to post all of my photos. and i have to admit that i can only show you a selection of my photos on that way cause i took about 1.000 pics... O;) what shall i do? i fell in love with that landscape... *sighing*



i decided to create a slideshow, that seemed to be the best way to post as much photos as possible - and it was very very hard to select them!!!

21 Juli 2007

Scandinavia Part I: Road trip

Finally i found my way back to the computer in order to show you a selection (we got about 900) of our Scandinavia photos:
the starting point of our trip was Kemi, at the Gulf of Bothnia, from where we went to Tornio/Haparanda to attend the wedding of a friend of mine. The funny thing is, Tornio is in Finland, Haparanda in Sweden and those two towns actually flow into each other only separated by a river. Both towns belong to different time zones, which made things a little confusing for us 8)
After the wedding was over we rent a car and took a road trip which lead us trough Lapland, northern Norway (Finmark) straight up to the North Cape and back to Kemi via Alta.
This is what a typical road there looks like:


It was a good feeling to drive there - especially cause we got a real good car (my preciousss):





Here you can see typical Scandinavian houses which are all painted in that special red tone.



The landscape was marvellous: Inari Lake


It was really not as cold as we thought before, we even got very hot - north of the polar circle! (somehow we had to flee the mosquitos...):



The road to the North cape was... different! We noticed from lack of radio reception that we were far from a bigger city, if you know what i mean ;) The landscape lost its woods and turned into a coastal region - we were now close by the Arctic Ocean, ooooh!



Norway belongs to a different time zone than Finland does, so we had to switch again - or actually switch back since Norway has the same time as Austria has. *confused* Now the night were really cold which prevented us from camping outside. In addition it got very windy:



We spent the coldest night on this trip some 100 metres south of the North Cape cause we slept in the car and the wind was blowing very cold even into the car! Horrible feeling the morning after, i can assure you!




... to be continued ...