Today we travelled just 600 km. We are on the edge of the Arctic Circle in a nice camp at Overkalix on the river Kalix. We have left the coast and the Bay of Bothnia behind us and headed up inland towards Finland.
We left our last campsite at about 11am and visited a Swedish Lidl which had a helpful beggar outside who lent us a coin for our trolley. Then we drove for four hours and stopped for a Swedish MacDonald's at Umea as a late lunch and a chance to finally connect to wifi. But we didn't like our food which was not as good as the lunch yesterday and when we set off we all somehow felt dissatisfied with ourselves, and then the coast road had few views of the sea and there seemed to be only the same red farmhouses and endless forest to look at. We started to understand just what a huge country Sweden is - twice as big as the UK with only 10 mil people. If we had gone south from Banska Bystrica we could have reached Sicily in the same distance as going from south Sweden to Nordkapp. (Useful facts provided by Maros).
One success of the journey was that I finally managed to photograph the now familiar 'watch out for the moose' road sign.
But then we got to our camp and had warm soup and grilled sausages, which we ate outside in a bracing arctic breeze and we felt better. We turned the heating on in the caravan and went to bed to have a read and get warm. Apparently it is about 5°C colder than it normally is in the summer here.
Highlights of the day - reaching the Arctic Circle, seeing a fox in the forest, nice people in the Overkalix camp and the toasty warm kitchen and toilets there (I considered sleeping in the kitchen). I'm glad I have the reindeer blanket.
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