Finnish Lapland + Murmansk

Time to tell something about our summer trip finally!

We started our journey very monday after Ilosaarirock in Joensuu by my curry-yellow Corsa. Headed directly to Rovaniemi where we camped over the first night. Tuesday we eased the pace a bit and slowly drove towards Ivalo. We had more breaks, a longer one in Sodankylä. We saw a lot of reindeers wandering about the Lapland roads, and somehow I managed to collapse with one! Luckily enough, the reindeer seemed to survive the collision pretty fine and just sprang into the forest. No any serious injuries to it hopefully :/

Wednesday we left the Corsa to Ivalo and took a bus towards Murmansk. The blacktop ended to the border and journey took about 7 hours (5h on the jumpy russian road). Lots of fun!
Late at night we arrived to Murmank and Virve's cousin and friend (they both work at the Finnish Embassy there) were waiting for us at the avtobus vokzal. We headed directly to their apartment and after some talking slept verry fine.

Thursday - Monday
Time for a walk through the streets of Murmansk: +7 middle of July and breezing arctic wind. This is the reason I wanted to go here! Not many wonders we saw but felt the city: A nice athmosphere where you can be lucky enough to do some shopping with Norwegian if you don't know Russian so well.
It was raining a lot during the trip, but occasionally we were lucky enough to see the sun, and best of all: Saw the sun at 2AM!
We ate well, maybe the best was at one Soviet PECTOPAH, Red Pub. I don't remember what we had but the Siberian Crown -beer was as good as I remembered.
Time in Murmansk was really good, I felt like having a real holiday, relaxed a lot there. Somehow it feels pretty good to be far far away from the usual everyday routines. Only one thing kept us busy thinking home; got short messages about our new becoming family member, Niila the Lapland's Dog. He was the reason we felt like leaving Murmansk a couple of days earlier that we planned.

Tuesday: Ranua Zoo
Stopped here to check out the polar bears. Funny characters!