Tag: Punkaharju

  • “The rainy day”
    The weather forecast promised that during the day it would come better, the rain would stop and there would be sunshine. But it didn’t!
    So I didn’t stop too many times and I didn’t take too many pictures.

    On the north side of Imatra TET Section 4 is following “Niska-Pietilä” museum road and not too far north from this road I turned away from TET.
    I was now checking the new possible section 10. And it had right away very nice parts that you can see in the video starting from here. It was amazing roads and tracks all the way to Punkaharju.
    And in Punkaharju the route goes of course from the old ridge road that was voted as the most beautiful road in Finland. It’s called now as “Vuosisadan tie” (The road of the century).

    Before Savonlinna quite luckily just beside this “new TET-route” there was sport resort Tanhuvaara and I stopped to ask the price for the room. It was a big surprise when they said 55€! And the breakfast was included. I didn’t think too long to choose this! Later in the evening I was riding to Savonlinna to eat something and I found quite good Chinese restaurant.
    The video of the day:

  • This summer we are making our holiday trip with the car. Luckily last winter I bought a Station Wagon (Ford Focus) so we can even make the beds to the back side of the car. The bed will be a little bit too short for me but I was thinking it will be OK.

    Ford Focus double bed

    We started driving on tuesday 23rd of June to the north from Imatra. The first goal was one nice hill quite close… So I typed the address to google maps and we started driving. After about 50 km’s we stopped and I was looking around. It was a wrong place!! I had typed “Hukkavuoren…” when I should have been typing “Haukkavuoren…” Luckily the correct place was only about 20km’s away!

    Walking to the hill

    The first place we visited was “Haukkavuori” in Rautjärvi. It’s a hill 79 meters above the lake below so the views are amazing!

    79 meters down

    We continued to Punkaharju. This National Landscape is so beautiful that people of Finland have voted this road as the most beautiful road in Finland!

    The most beautiful road.

    We checked one possible sleeping place near Punkaharju but it wasn’t ok… and it was still quite early. We continued to Kerimäki.

    Kerimäki church

    This is the biggest wooden church in the world. We had seen it before so we continued to check few bunkers close to Kerimäki. There is so called “Salpalinja” that Finnish soldiers built during the WW II against the Russian attack. Luckily we never needed to use this defense line.
    Finally quite far from Punkaharju and Kerimäki we found a place to stay for the night. It was only 1,5 km’s from the Russian border!

    Near Russian border

    First day’s route was like this: