Welcome to Finland. In this case, it’s far northern Finland. This is a sparsely populated part of Finland. We left our ship and entered Norway from Kirkenes and drove southward about two and a half hours to Ivalo. This will just be an introduction to the far north of Finland and what we saw on our drive south.

Finland is covered with forest. The first photo was highly typical of what we saw on our drive. The forests were pine, spruce, birch and other trees. The hills and mountains were low. There was snow on the highest sections of the mountains. The road is the main highway through this area. There was practically no traffic.

Finland has some 188,000 lakes. So if someone tells you that Finland is the land of 100,000 lakes, that’s a gross understatement. Lakes take up about ten percent of the land surface in Finland. Water was everywhere in Finland, like in the second photo.

If the third photo looks like we were out in the wilds, we weren’t. I took this photo out of the window of our hotel room in Ivalo. Finland also has lots of rivers.

We made several stops and took several short walks on our drive south into Finland. The fourth photo was on one of those hikes. This is evidently great food hunting grounds for moose and reindeer.

This was May 22nd, 2019 and the sun was up 24 hours a day but as you can see, we still ran into snow at times. It was blowing and cold but we were dressed sufficiently for it and it never lasted very long.