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Jyväskylä - Oulu, and more woods

The temperature isn't bad today, but it is cloudy and sometimes it seems as if rain will be falling soon. But it doesn't fall when we are heading to Vaala. At least, Vaala it would be, we thought. But our Dutch neighbours told us they first had a reservation for Vaala but that it had been changed; so we looked at our itinerary and we also have a change of plan. This has to do with the festival of he midsummernight, the most important celebration in Scandinavia. All campsites have been booked by locals long before we did.
And again we pass hundreds of lakes without seeing a bit of them.

In Reisjärvi we pass this church as the most interesting building on our journey today, although we try hard to find other places as well. Even when we are looking for a nice place to have lunch and drive on sandy paths it is hard to find a nice spot near a lake. We like Finland for its woods, but of the 50,000 lakes we have passed now, we have only seen 5! In fact, Finland falls a bit short on our expectations: we expected a somewhat more rough nature, but the woods are straigth and reforested and the roads are long and straight without much alternation. And in this country of lakes we see see very little of them. Or is it a joke of a cartographer who has drawn all these imaginarily lakes on his map?

We are now on our way to Kalajoki, located at the Botnic Gulf; wherever it is possible we take side roads and enjoy the woods; but probably one has to stay on one spot for a longer time to get a glimmer of one of the 100,000 lakes Finland claims to have.
When we are one kilometre away of the camping at Kalajoki, we come across a traffic jam and it takes more than an hour to arrive at the gate of the camping. The roads are filled with drunken youths, stalls and youths who want to get drunk as soon as possible. At the reception of the camping we are told it would be better for us if we would seek another place to stay and they want to give us our money back. We would like to attend this great festival, but we don't like all these drunks (at four in the afternoon) and decide we take our money (€ 50) and look for another place to stay.

Fortunately, it is still early (and light) and we drive to Kempele, more than hundred kilometres to the north, a bit south of Oulu. We find a motel which also costs € 50, but now we have a shower, streaming water and our own private bathroom! We miss the party, but at least we get some rest this night. Also we can change some of our Dutch euro's for Finnish ones; we had promised some Dutch friends to take back Finnish euro's. After the owner tells us almost every year someone gets killed at the festival at Kalajoki, we are really happy we didn't stay there.

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with Elisabeth and Teije