Roadtrip!

Less than one week after I left Helsinki some Belgian friends came to visit me.
Ofcourse they know what’s good and the brought the right things with them:

 

They stayed in our apartment for a night so we could plan our roadtrip to the north!
 

We First drove to Kiruna in Sweden where we stayed for two nights in ‘The Yellow house’.
The First morning we were picked up by a van to make an awesome snowmobile-trip to the amazing and beautiful ICE-HOTEL!

 
    

It was really amazing! After the visit it was time to jump back on our snowmobiles, to have some fun on the frozen lakes at speeds around 100km/h and then just a easeful ride through the beautiful snow-covered  forest. Just awesome !

After out trip we got a special dish with traditional reindeer (not that bad at all)
We also had the luck to watch the start of a husky-race:

After our second night the temperatures went around minus 25 degrees.
We got up early to continue our roadtrip, but the car had other ideas:

It was a good thing we had a member of the garage ‘Die van ons’ with us.
One of the electrical park-breaks was frozen so we just ripped it out and proceeded our tour through the really beautiful roads with a lovely beeping warning-sound for the next 600km! (Don’t worry, if you put the music loud enough you won’t hear it anymore)*

When we got near our ‘checkpoint’ Rovaniemi we passed the most northern MacDonald’s of the world! So we couldn’t resist having a quick bite.

 
For our night in Rovaniemi we booked a room from real Sami-people.
When we tried to start the car the day after it looked like it was a cold night outside, even the olive oil in the car was frozen. So probably the oil of the car itself was frozen too. With the help of some locals we pushed the car inside to warm up. This gave us the opportunity to check out an interesting museum nearby.

 

Before heading back to Oulu we just had to make one more stop: SANTA CLAUS VILLAGE!
Where the real Santa lives, we even saw him but he should be ashamed of the prices they are asking just to take a picture with him. But it’s very beautiful inside and it’s nice what he does with all the letters he gets from everyone.
 
(Arrow to Bruxelles: 2158km)

There is so much more to tell/show, but sauna is waiting!
Have a safe ride back home guys.

* These repairs were performed by professionals of the garage ‘Die van ons’.
Do not try this at .. roadtrip.