The little blob on this map is my 3.9 mile journey from the Viking Line terminal over to Lautassari where I am staying until next week.

The most challenging part of the last few days has been finding out where to park. The last yellow squiggle on the second map is me finding somewhere suitable. I have made a study of parked motorcycles in this neighbourhood and my conclusion is that bikes don’t have to display permits to park. So fingers crossed.

Helsinki is an undemonstrative city. For example, this is design week but they keep the events hidden. On Saturday morning, after my week at Metropolia, I retrace my steps to the port and get on the 2 and a half hour trip down to Tallinn. I’m hoping for some dry weather – at least for my setting out. From then I head down through three Baltic countries and sail off from Lithuania back to northern Germany.

Day 5 On the boat to Helsinki!

Out of my porthole (I paid 10 Euro to upgrade to an outside cabin and I am so glad I did) I am watching the many Islands of Sweden go past as we navigate out into open sea. So many summer houses by the sea that I can imagine in Bergman films. I am watching our progress too on Google maps.

The boat docks somewhere at 9pm – I hadn’t realised. At Marienham I think, an island in the middle of nowhere. I wonder why you would live there

This is my first experience of Viking Line. I liked being offered the upgrade – I presume they had empty cabins to fill but I didn’t like having to wait nearly two hours in the rain sitting on my bike waiting to be called on to board. Boarding seemed – I was going to say disorganised as one moment a truck rolled on (carefully I noted the drivers slowing down as they boarded with a huge thud for each wheel moving from the dry land to the ramp of the boat) but actually they wanted to fill up the space carefully with a particular combination of shapes so it was not disorganised from their point of view – just frustrating for me in the rain. Actually it was motorbikes – me and one more BMW GS being ridden by a couple of Finns went on last – sideways behind a trailer. It took a bit of working out how best to lash it down. There was a big bucket of straps but nowhere obvious to fix the bikes. But I did myself proud and I think set an example to my fellow bikers. The wind and rain on the quayside made me anticipate a not smooth crossing so I wanted to get this right. With all my care and unpacking exactly everything I needed for the crossing I was the last off the car deck. They were starting to turn off the lights while I was there. My cabin is fine. It has one sofa and the beds are still folded up – sleeper train style. Everything is unpacked and all the wet things are hanging out to dry and the things that need charging are plugged in (one by one). I’m showered and munching the roll I made at breakfast – German guest style.

Today’s ride was fine – two and a half, nearly three hours riding in the rain. But I had exactly the right clothes on so felt completely sorted along with extra layers underneath, waterproof on top and high vis and finally worked out how to turn the extra fog lamps on.

We have been sailing for over an hour and we are still passing beautiful old summer houses by the sea front or hidden by trees. Most are painted a deep orange but some are a grey-blue. They are actual islands that you have to get to by ferry. I wonder who lives here or owns them. I imagine established old Swedish families. We are travelling north between two of them. Today was a motorway day. I don’t think there was any other route from where I was staying to Stockholm. Getting in to the city was also fine with completely accurate instructions from the GPS that took me exactly to the ferry check-in. I had an hour or so to spare so perched in a bicycle shelter by the car park with my carton of Oatley and some of my stashed food supplies. There is a car alarm going off on the deck below. I will venture out to see what is on offer for dinner. This view is astonishing – to think that I would be completely ignorant of it if I had been inside the boat. So now we are travelling northwest. We go north for quite a way before finally turning east toward Finland.

Today was 136 miles riding and it took 2 hours and 40 minutes.

One Viking Line buffet dinner later. A mass of humanity. So many people have odd walks of one kind. Helsinki time is another hour ahead. Why are all these people going to Helsinki?

Later still…

Oh dear, this is a rough crossing. We are heaving and banging. We dock at Marienham in a while.

Day 4 in the motel

Phew! I enjoyed staying at the Hotel Finn. Breakfast was fun – completely self-service great coffee from a machine, croissants (no one knows how to make proper croissants apart from the French and those who copy them), muesli with yoghurt and orange juice. I paused a while in the room to get calm before I set off. The bike was still where I left it, entirely unmolested. I decided that today would be my non-motorway day and put in a direction of Vaxjo which I have no idea how I would pronounce if I had to ask someone the way to it. I was taken onto and across on the route 23. It was a beautiful ride, lovely calm scenery and on a beautiful sunny Sunday morning. Fields, dwellings, lakes and of course pine trees. The only downside was the incredibly low speed limits in this country that most people seem to stick to with a few over-takers. Plus some agricultural vehicles but once the first 40 or so miles were done, things speeded up and I was going at not much less than I rode on some of the way over here through crowded motorways in Holland and Germany. The roads are mostly good though with those nasty dangerous wire barriers in the middle of some.

The bike was running well, the hotel was good and I was pleased that I decided to avoid all motorways.

Looking for what I thought was a picnic area I ended up in a small town that had yet another unattended machine in the town square – this time one that served petrol once you had worked out that you had to put in a credit card in a separate booth. Fuelled up I headed off again. My next stop was in a small layby by a wood. I also had some food and Mango flavoured Oatley in its land of origin. Not much but enough to feel thoroughly sorted and ready for the rest of the trip. The map told me that after Vaxjo taking the 31 and 32 in a northerly direction would take me right here – another 200k.

I suppose the scenery got progressively less scenic and a little more industrial at the same time that the weather got worse. We were promised cloud but we got rain. So stop number three was at a rural bus stop to pull on the huge Mr Balloon Man rain suit. As fortune would have it someone had left a single chair just next to the bus stop making the ridiculous procedure of climbing into the suit very slightly less awkward. Eventually the GPS put me onto the E4 motorway which I had been avoiding all day but just for 5 miles before depositing me outside the hotel on a rather forlorn country road. I had to double check I really had booked this place and I had. The person at the desk who spoke impeccable English told me that the motel rooms were round the back and I should drive round there. I remembered that this is what attracted me to the place and being able to park the bike under its own veranda out of the rain is perfect. The cabin is cute. I’m not sure when they were built but they have been renovated recently and have the same bathrooms as the Hotel Finn with great under floor heating. I had a meal of white fish at 4.30 because the kitchen closes at 5 on Sundays. The restaurant reminded me of similar roadside places in Norway that seem to attract families out for a rather casual eat. Only if it were Norway the food would be covered in cling film. Here it wasn’t.

I have the radiator on in the room. It was 14 degrees outside earlier and the places are built of wood. Each cabin has an electric supply for electric vehicles. I wonder how much that is used. There seems to be only one other vehicle here. It is pretty bleak outside now in the wet.

Tomorrow my ferry for Helsinki leaves at 4.30 and so I have an easy journey from here to Stockholm. The forecast shows very dark clouds and rain so it will be a matter of wrapping up and keeping my head down – not even hoping to avoid it. I hope there is somewhere under shelter to wait at the ferry terminal. And I wonder what time they board the ship.

So far I think my planning has paid off well. The distances and routes have been fine and the hotels good. So, after tonight, one night on the Ferry and then I arrive in Helsinki that will be my home for nearly two weeks.

240 miles (again) taking 5 hours and 4 minutes.

I’ve finally booked all the hotels and the major ferry crossings for my trip in late August and September to Helsinki where I’m working for a week on an Erasmus exchange. I’m travelling over there via Germany, Denmark and Sweden arriving on the ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. I’m travelling back via Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania where I take a ferry through the Baltic Sea to Kiel in northern Germany (I miss out Polish roads) then retrace my first steps to Hook of Holland and a last ferry home to England. All the stopping places are loaded and this is what the trip looks like – a bit odd because the parts by sea are missing. Its about 2000 riding miles – a little less. No camping because all my camping equipment is still in store. I’ll save that for next year.

Four or five years ago, the useful for logging bike journeys, Everytrail stopped working. It was bought up by Tripadvisor and left to slowly break. Shame as it was a convenient site for uploading GPS tracks directly from the GPS device – it had the clever ability of finding your latest GPX file and separating it out into separate journeys. What was useful was that it was made easy to embed the code for your trip into blogs and websites. After it stopped I started using TripTrack.org, at the suggestion of my technical and travel guru Geoff Jones. But getting the particular track that you wanted from your GPS onto the website seemed to need an intermediary. I used Adze.

Today in my email I got an announcement that AllTrails had taken over Everytrail (when will they run out of names?) and inviting me to make an account. I responded immediately and eventually my trips (now called recordings) from Everytrail appeared on their site. But can I embed the trails in my blog? Let’s try.

Here:

OK, hmm. Let’s try some different code:

OK, these links load very slowly and are not that useful or good to look at. AllTrails does not impress. Also every page features prominent incitements to pay for a ‘Pro’ account, pointing out to you all the things you can’t do unless you fork out $30 per year. I will keep looking.

What about this? this is Geoff’s solution. He got it working for him but it doesn’t seem to work for me yet. there should be a map here –
[sgpx gpx=”/wp-content/uploads/gpx/CurrentTrackLog.gpx”]
Triptrack.org can find an upload the GPX current file from a connected GPS but is not able to separate the different parts so uploads all your recent journeys together – which is not so helpful.

Another bad sleep with the muggy night and the creaky floorboards of the insomniac directly above me and the characteristic noisy hotel plumbing where you can hear people showering and flushing toilets almost anywhere in the building. There was even an attack of the classic water hammer at around 5.30. At breakfast the guest profile seemed newly diverse, though the little white haired and very old and fragile lady who always sits in the same seat in the restaurant is there and other elderly couples (who have six legs between them as the oracle at Delphi would say) are still here. They address the waitresses as ‘dear’. With a bit of a wobble of my loaded up bike, I left at around 9am and decided to head straight back home so blasted along the motorways back to my front door, 163 miles in 3 hours and 20 minutes. Good weather and good progress apart from the M25 as usual.

There’s more to say but this is all for now.

Here’s the track of the whole trip (woops ignore the bit to Thetford)- not very adventurous in terms of travel, sadly, but I had other priorities this year with the book deadline and maybe moving house within a couple of months.