Getting McCharged and going East

Day 63 – July 26^th

With much of what we had planned to achieve in Norway now accomplished, we awoke in Roros with our minds set on getting out of Norway and as far across Sweden as we could in one day. 

Both countries are quite long but not wide, so we actually managed to get from the Norway/Sweden border to the easterly coast of Sweden in about half a day, stopping at the town of Sundsvall in the afternoon for a look around. 

Although quite a nice town, there wasn’t much to keep us in Sundsvall so we continued north along the coast as we were planning to get a ferry over to Finland the following day.

We ended up in a town called Harnosand and lobbed into the local McDonalds to book the ferry for the next day and to do some general research on Finland. 

McDonalds are fast becoming quite a useful rest stop for us, as were able to connect to the Internet for free, use their toilets and also recharge our laptop and phone batteries and have also been cheeky enough to take in a power board and recharge our portable music system as well!

After about 3 hours and a couple of sundaes in McDonalds (this is all we treat ourselves to so we don’t end up the size of houses), we drove across the road to a nice wild camp spot on the edge of the river, cooked up marinara for dinner and enjoyed some of the great (and strong) cider Sweden produces.

Day 64 – July 27^th 

With our ferry over to Finland not leaving until later in the evening we had a bit of time up our sleeves to see a bit more of Sweden before we left it for good. 

We took a quick look around Hannosand after breakfast (well Luke did while trying to find a public toilet), and then set off to an area of Sweden known as Hoga Kusten, which is translates to the ‘High Cliffs’. 

The bridge over to Hoga Kusten - probably the most picturesque part of Sweden.

For most of our time in Sweden we had travelled up the southwestern side, as we came in from Denmark. Although not ugly, this coastal area wasn’t much to write home about so we were quite surprised when heading up the east coast to see how beautiful the scenery was and the fact it didn’t really get a mention in any of the literature we had read about the country.

We arrived in the town of Norrfallsviken for lunch as we had heard they did a really good seafood buffet for only £20, but were disappointed to find that the buffet was only done on the weekends and being a Friday, we were a day early. Instead we had our own seafood buffet from a John West Salmon tin between two slices of bread.

Norrfallsviken town on the Hoga Kusten coast. Seafood buffet is on Saturday and Sunday only - not Fridays :(

After a quick stroll around town and lunch, we then decided to continue going north and stop in the town of Umea (where our ferry was leaving from), so we could use the Internet to research Russia a bit more. 

Another 3 hours was killed in McDonalds (again) we then headed towards the ferry port to load up onto the ship for our four and a half hour journey over to Finland. 

As we were leaving around dinnertime we decided to take our esky on full of food, beer and wine but were shocked to see that harsh penalties would be enforced if you were found to be taking drugs and alcohol onto the ship. Our concern quickly abated when we saw that pretty much all the Finnish people were drinking on the ship, so decided to crack a few beers and drink them conspicuously. 

We finally docked into Vassa, Finland around midnight and then started our drive south towards Helsinki. Given the time of night and the fact we only had about 5 litres of diesel left, we decided to stop into the first motorway truck stop, tune into the second half of the Olympic opening ceremony and wild camp for the night.