On the Road Again, actually On the Rails Again! This time further north in Finland to the town of Rovaniemi, the official Hometown of Santa Claus! And his Reindeer! We caught a morning train for the 5 hour ride to just below the Arctic Circle.

We left from the quaint train station in Kokkola, restored and still used.

We arrived in Rovaniemi at about 3pm and walked the 20 minutes to our Airbnb. This apartment is very near a lake with a backdoor opening onto the path around the lake.

You might notice the metal rack (with the blue arrow pointing to it). We’ve seen these behind almost every apartment building and are stumped as to their use! A weird clothes line? A ski rack? A weird bike rack? More on this later!

After we unpacked we walked to the grocery store and the liquor store. In Finland all beer, wine and spirits are sold in state run liquor stores that have limited open hours! Luckily the stores were in the same shopping center!

Walking along the lakeshore, past these fragrant flowers was a wonderful start and finish to our shopping foray.

A bonus in this apartment, and a staple in many Finnish households (even one bedroom apartments!) is a sauna! Accurately pronounced “Sow-naa”!A wonderful way to relax in the steamy heat, then a cold shower, and the best night’s sleep in a long time!

On our walks we found the bike shop that rents bikes.

The wooden bikes were a bit heavy looking!

The weather prediction for today is great, so we picked up a couple of bikes and went riding!

Over the river…

…and through the woods!

To the ‘beach’. The trail through the woods ends at a peninsula most of which is a bird sanctuary.

Walking around we found this sign, and using Google translate we got a taste of the dry Finnish humor! The sign says “ski slope”!

We found a boardwalk and rode out over marshy grounds to the bird observation tower.

We rode around to the small holiday village of Elba and found a restaurant overlooking Kaustar bay.

Taking the road back to Kokkola we saw several older houses that suggest this area has been a vacation spot for many years!We had a wonderful ride with not too many mosquitoes, we even found raspberries along the road to taste!

Between rain showers we took walks around town.

Town Hall. A brief history of Kokkola which was “..at one point the largest town in Finland, thanks to the tar and shipbuilding trade..” can be found at A Step Back into Finnish History.

Another wooden building we passed several times on our walks to the store.

Other aspects of the Kokkola economy were fishing and hunting seals.

Roundabout art!

The weather has changed along with our latitude! It is cooler and we have a few days of rain predicted! A relief from the heat we were experiencing in southern and central Europe! We relaxed and took occasional walks. We discovered the ‘old town’ of Kokkola, a neighborhood called Neristan composing of about a dozen blocks of wooden houses from the 1800’s.

The houses are very orderly, built in a grid pattern.

The higher the rock foundation the more wealthy the home owner supposedly was. This building appears to have been a school for a long time.

From these pictures the school has been active since at least 1907!

Doors to the houses were not always on the street, narrow driveways between houses revealed courtyards, secret gardens and porches where I assume the door would be.

This courtyard has a picturesque old log shed.

A very early morning! We had a bus to catch for the half hour ride to the Warsaw airport for our flight at 8:55am to Helsinki, Finland! We arrived the requisite one and a half hours before our flight and walked around the airport because we will be sitting for several hours, under 2 hours on the flight, then over 4 hours on a train.A montage of the first half of day. Clockwise from upper right; The Staszic Palace, an imposing building housing The Polish Academy of Sciences, on our way to the bus stop at 6 in the morning! The newstand at the airport with important world news, so glad that Kamala gets equal space with Taylor Swift, and the opening ceremony of the Olympics! On the plane, our first ‘Long Drink’, the popular drink of Finland! The view of the Gulf of Riga, along the coast of Latvia. And finally, maybe the coast of Finland?

We landed in Helsinki, the airport being outside the city, we never actually saw Helsinki! We were able to take a subway the short distance to a suburban train station to catch our train that will take us north to the seaside town of Kokkola on the Gulf of Bothnia!Clockwise from upper left; The countryside of Finland, farm fields carved out of the boreal forest. The train that continues north above the Arctic Circle, it was very comfortable. The gorgeous flowers growing in the small beautiful town of Kokkola.Walking through town to our Airbnb, then to the grocery store and back, we found the small but serene Sunti River.