Today we hit The Arctic Circle. This happened on our way to the city of Rovaniemi which is the capital city of Lapland, the home of the Sami people. Along the way we got our first sightings of reindeer and one very obscured moose. As an aside we have been looking for moose since Poland. There have been signs warning of moose every 5 km since we entered Finland, but his is first real sighting.

According to our guide book the city of Rovaniemi was destroyed by the Germans during their retreat towards the end of WWII and was subsequently rebuilt with the main streets formed to depict the head and antlers of a reindeer. I am not sure we could see this but we took the guide books word for it.

In Rovaniemi there was a very good museum on the peoples of the worlds Arctic regions. I had not realized that there are about 4.5 million people living in the various Arctic regions and about 1.9 million of them are in Russia. A very impressive museum housed in a building with a cylindrical glass roof. Interestingly it made the building very hot.

We found a camping spot a little south of the city on a lake/canal front. We got the coordinates of this place from the camping log of the travelin-tortugas. They described it as a boat launch for the local yacht club. But recent works to install large water pipes have made access more difficult and we pretty much had the place to our selves.

Getting to sleep was a bit of a challenge. At this latitude the sun does not set at all between June 6th and July 7th and while we are outside that window of time it still did not get dark even though technically the sun did set. It seemed to be below the horizon for a couple of hours.