Up at 5am and a lovely breakfast of cheese, yogurt, apple juice and coffee. Just what I needed to face the mornings bike ride.
The countryside soon turned from farming land to forest and a 14km preserved stretch of the Oxen road.which was a joy to cycle except that the hills were a killer!!!
Today though was destined to be a short day (106km) as there is basically no where to stay between Riihimäki and Lahti the next town afterwards of any size (which by the way has no where advertised to where I could stay). so I decided to play it safe and finish early.
Reached Hämeeninna around lunchtime which is where the Oxen road ended. A very nice little town with a medieval castle and some museums. Lots of coaches were disgorging scouts and girl guides who were all assembling with banners and drums for some sort of parade.This area is famous for its barracks and garrison so they could well have been preparing for some sort of commemoration. However I had no time to stay so headed for a hotel to get something warm to drink and recharge my camera battery which had expired.
The afternoon was very different as I am no longer on the Oxen road. Only 80km north of Helsinki it was a lot more built up with roads and major highways so I was zig zagging all over the place avoiding the big roads. Arrived in Riihmäki in good time to find a hotel and have a decent meal. Also seems that Turo saw my post about me being in Finland so the plan now is to head to Kouvola and catch a train at 1722 to Helsinki so we can catch up. Going to be tough though because it 130km so I better not get a puncture :)
What I did come across today though were military cemeteries from WW2. This was unexpected but then I remembered that Finland was attacked and invaded by Russia in the winter of 1939\40. Finland had actually broken away from Russia in 1917 and declared independence and now Russia wanted the country back using the pretense that Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) was only 40km from the border. The war was fairly short, a little over a hundred days, but it saw a vastly outnumbered Finnish Army made up of mainly civilians without uniforms fighting a highly mechanized Russian force with air supremacy, Almost 70,000 Finns were killed or wounded in the fighting along with 323,000 Russians in what was one of the coldest winters on record. See Finnish Winter War for more details.
Early to bed because I am up early as breakfast is at 0600
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