There’s bad news and there’s good news. The bad news is that I’m stuck waiting at Stansted Airport all night until I can get an express coach to central London tomorrow morning. The good news is that someone plugged in a WiFi router and didn’t change the default security settings so I have free Internet on my laptop. There is no describing how happy I am about this.

My trip from Helsinki was interesting. We drove up to this place called Hell’s Lake, which is kind of a national park. We drove through the park in Arttu’s parent’s Volvo, torturing the suspension all the way on the dirt roads. We decided it’s called Hell’s Lake because it’s harder than hell to find. Here’s a photo I snapped while we were looking at a map trying to figure out where in Hell’s Lake we were. Giant mosquitoes the size of tennis balls beset me at this point so I was forced to give up my quest for a decent photo of the place.

Then we drove down to the Tampere airport. It was actually a beautiful drive. The terrain is much like northern Ontario, but with more people. There are rolling fields of golden grain amongst tall stands of pine and birch trees. The roads are excellent. Ontario could learn a thing or two from the Finns about creating frost-proof roads.

We got to the airport in plenty of time to catch my flight. The flight was uneventful and crowded. I learned the best place to sit on a Ryanair flight is near the back, so you can duck out the back door quickly when the plane lands. I got through security pretty fast, and now I’m just sitting waiting for the sun to come up. More later…