Delays, delays.
We are back in England now and have been fro nearly 2 weeks. This blog has been sorely neglected and (I think) the whole idea of a blog is that it should be written with immediacy. Still there it is - what happened next?
From Lapeenranta, we continued for our last day actually on the Iron Curtain Trail. But we were not on the trail; Lapeenranta is not on it and we had gone there partly for the paucity of accomodation on the actual trail at that point, and partly because the canal-side ride was appealing. So back to the trail. This was an ordinary road out of Lapeenranta, but a good one with separate cycle tracks until past the suburbs and with very light traffic. We rejoined the offical route short of the place on the border where the main railway crosses, Varikaala. We had memories of this place; in 1988 we crossed the border here in a train from Leningrad to Helsinki. The train was rather old carriages and stopped for a long time both sides of the border, in Vyborg and here. The station canteen was full of cling-film wrapped delicacies at high prices. Now there were a couple of super-modern trains, going each way, with Allegro written on the side, completely inaccessible from the road, since the platforms were "sealed off" by high fences in the name of security (of course), presumably Schengen security this time. The canteen was there, and we could get to it (the train passengers could not) and it is now the local cafe. Not a big range of things to buy, but tasty and we sat for a while to look at the trains.
In the sidings, there were quite a lot of assorted goods wagons, in typical railway style. There was one train of timber wagons full of ... timber. This was intriguing, because neither Russia nor Finland are short of timber, so which way was it going? No movement. I reckoned in the end that the contents may belong to a commodities speculator in London who will have it move as appropriate when she has settled a deal. Or maybe the speculator is just waiting for the timber price to rise and this is a convenient place to store it......
On from the station on a dirt road in reasonable condition, and if we thought the South had less steep hills we were wrong. At one point, on an exceptionally steep dowen hill, I turned to avoid a pot hole and my front wheel began oscillating left-right-left-right... and it was quite scary. Could not safely brake and to come off at this speed on gravel would have hurt and required use of the EHIC card. I did not come off. Katherine also found this hill quite something. Eventually we joined to main road from Lapeenranta to Virolahti. Well graded, gradients smoothed out, not too much traffic. Basically a relief, though one does accept the fascination of dirt roads that seems to affect route planners. They (the roads, not the planners) are quiet, they go through countryside one feels much more in touch with one's surroundings and actually some of the best cycling moments of the whole trip had been on dirt roads.
We got to a jewellery centre at Ylaama. The musuem was unfortunately closed, but there was a cafe and several shops. Ylaama is in the centre of an area where there is a certain rock, recently discovered, that has unusual diffractive qualities, so it gleams in light and diffracts it into a range of colours. They named it spectrolite and with splitting and polishing it makes a gem stone. We bought, but not extensively. Then on. The rtoue officially went to the right to a war-time museum and then on another dirt road. I was getting tired and was concerned I might be over-doing things from my heart's point of view - I had had slight twinges at the end of the dirt road, on a particularly strenuous bit. So we just went on on our current main road until we got to the Helsink-Petersburg main(er) road very near the border. We then made a map reading error, confusing a snow-mobile track with a real road. We were aiming at the campsite recommended in the route guide. The actual specified route took us on a loop on a dirt road with hills.... well, I just took it easy and we got there.
End of this section of the Iron Curtain Cycle Trail. The intention is to come back next year and do the bit through the Baltic States on the other side of the Gulf of Finland.
The coastline here is full of estuaries and inlets, so we never saw the broad expanse of the Gulf of Finland. The campsite was by an estuary, with slightly salty water but no rise and fall becuase the further reaches of the Baltic do not have tides! But we had done "sea to sea".
I am short of up-to-date images on this computer, but here is what a road looks like when you still have a long way to go
To come - more photos, the museums of the Salpa Line, and what we did next.
We are back in England now and have been fro nearly 2 weeks. This blog has been sorely neglected and (I think) the whole idea of a blog is that it should be written with immediacy. Still there it is - what happened next?
From Lapeenranta, we continued for our last day actually on the Iron Curtain Trail. But we were not on the trail; Lapeenranta is not on it and we had gone there partly for the paucity of accomodation on the actual trail at that point, and partly because the canal-side ride was appealing. So back to the trail. This was an ordinary road out of Lapeenranta, but a good one with separate cycle tracks until past the suburbs and with very light traffic. We rejoined the offical route short of the place on the border where the main railway crosses, Varikaala. We had memories of this place; in 1988 we crossed the border here in a train from Leningrad to Helsinki. The train was rather old carriages and stopped for a long time both sides of the border, in Vyborg and here. The station canteen was full of cling-film wrapped delicacies at high prices. Now there were a couple of super-modern trains, going each way, with Allegro written on the side, completely inaccessible from the road, since the platforms were "sealed off" by high fences in the name of security (of course), presumably Schengen security this time. The canteen was there, and we could get to it (the train passengers could not) and it is now the local cafe. Not a big range of things to buy, but tasty and we sat for a while to look at the trains.
In the sidings, there were quite a lot of assorted goods wagons, in typical railway style. There was one train of timber wagons full of ... timber. This was intriguing, because neither Russia nor Finland are short of timber, so which way was it going? No movement. I reckoned in the end that the contents may belong to a commodities speculator in London who will have it move as appropriate when she has settled a deal. Or maybe the speculator is just waiting for the timber price to rise and this is a convenient place to store it......
On from the station on a dirt road in reasonable condition, and if we thought the South had less steep hills we were wrong. At one point, on an exceptionally steep dowen hill, I turned to avoid a pot hole and my front wheel began oscillating left-right-left-right... and it was quite scary. Could not safely brake and to come off at this speed on gravel would have hurt and required use of the EHIC card. I did not come off. Katherine also found this hill quite something. Eventually we joined to main road from Lapeenranta to Virolahti. Well graded, gradients smoothed out, not too much traffic. Basically a relief, though one does accept the fascination of dirt roads that seems to affect route planners. They (the roads, not the planners) are quiet, they go through countryside one feels much more in touch with one's surroundings and actually some of the best cycling moments of the whole trip had been on dirt roads.
We got to a jewellery centre at Ylaama. The musuem was unfortunately closed, but there was a cafe and several shops. Ylaama is in the centre of an area where there is a certain rock, recently discovered, that has unusual diffractive qualities, so it gleams in light and diffracts it into a range of colours. They named it spectrolite and with splitting and polishing it makes a gem stone. We bought, but not extensively. Then on. The rtoue officially went to the right to a war-time museum and then on another dirt road. I was getting tired and was concerned I might be over-doing things from my heart's point of view - I had had slight twinges at the end of the dirt road, on a particularly strenuous bit. So we just went on on our current main road until we got to the Helsink-Petersburg main(er) road very near the border. We then made a map reading error, confusing a snow-mobile track with a real road. We were aiming at the campsite recommended in the route guide. The actual specified route took us on a loop on a dirt road with hills.... well, I just took it easy and we got there.
End of this section of the Iron Curtain Cycle Trail. The intention is to come back next year and do the bit through the Baltic States on the other side of the Gulf of Finland.
The coastline here is full of estuaries and inlets, so we never saw the broad expanse of the Gulf of Finland. The campsite was by an estuary, with slightly salty water but no rise and fall becuase the further reaches of the Baltic do not have tides! But we had done "sea to sea".
I am short of up-to-date images on this computer, but here is what a road looks like when you still have a long way to go
To come - more photos, the museums of the Salpa Line, and what we did next.
