Norway
This morning we headed towards the border with Norway and what started out as another great Finish summers day slowly turned into a cool overcast 50°F (10°C). The forest of evergreens gave way to stunted birch and the roads suddenly were quite bumpy.
Our last stock-up on groceries just before the border gave us an opportunity to buy a nice piece of already cooked and waiting to eat reindeer rib. The border crossing was a non-event, lots of signs but no officials, so we just drove through.
The first leg of our stay in Norway was north and east towards the town of Kirkenes which turned out to be an ordinary little town situated on a windswept headland. We spent some time walking around getting the feel of the place and looking for a bank cash machine to get some Norwegian money.
This area of Norway is close to Russia and along the road many signs were in Russian, and at one turn we saw a sign indicating the Russian city of Murmansk.
We cheated a little on our camping log today as I have given the GPS coordinates of Kirkenes as our camping spot, but actually we camped in a gravel pit about 20km back down the road to the west. I just wanted to get Kirkenes as a spot on our map.
Also we had to make a couple of tries at finding a camping site. Our first attempt was a big flat area that even provided a flat concrete pad, we thought this spot would be ok as when we pulled in a cargo truck was already parked there.
Interestingly not long after we stopped the driver of that truck approached us asked something in Russian. We deduced that he wanted directions to the Russian border - so once again with map in hand we gave someone directions to Russia
Some hours later a couple of soldiers turned up and in good English told us we could not stay here for the night as it was a restricted area. So we moved to our gravel pit a bit down the road.