July 2007 - Posts
We are planning attend Jänkhällä Jytisee 2007 and on the way have one more SS1000 Iron Butt ride.
Planned route is this:
Start from Espoo 16th of August 10:00, then to Jyväskylä, Turku, Vaasa, Oulu, Kuusamo and end in Sodankylä where we meet some local bikers and continue to Saariselkä. In Sodankylä we should be sometime between 06:00 and 08:00, latest.
Microsoft AutoRoute 2007 is giving 1696.8 kilometers and driving time 20 hours 26 minutes including 5 breaks, so there is going to be plenty of kilometers and time to ride this.
Our third driving day started from Duisburg after good night sleep in Hotel Novotel. Our goal was to take it slowly and drive whole day and next night to get to the Viking Line Isabella from Stockholm to Turku.
We finally arrived at 06:00 to the ferry terminal after driving 1486 kilometers using this route:
After getting to the ferry we went eating breakfast and slept for couple of hours to get some more strength to continue from Turku to home in Espoo, Finland.
Our last piece of driving was *only* 153 kilometers:
It is now easy to smile as everything is behind, we managed to drive ~10 000 kilometers in ten days while staying also in one place for a week making total trip time to 17 days.
Second driving day over, we decided to cut some corners and started from Porto, Portugal and drove directly into Duisburg, Germany using this route:
This route gave us 2339 kilometers driving and took 35 hours to drive! We just slept quickly for hour or so on the truck stop and then continued rest of the day...
First driving day over, we managed to drive 847 kilometers through Spain and Portugal!
Now we are a bit thinking to replan tomorrow's route, but final decisions will be made on tomorrow morning during the breakfast. Aim is not to do full round through Portugal and Spain, but cut from Porto more directly into France.
But, lets see what will be tomorrows plan!
Our rest in Rota, Spain is almost over, tomorrow morning we start the journey back to home. My family will fly home and we start driving rest of our journey back to Espoo, Finland.
Weather in Rota has been excellent, we have been most of our time on the beach swimming and taking it easy.
We managed to get a garage for our bikes - thanks to our hotel Dunas y Luz:
Until now we have been driving 5022 kilometers using route below:
Our planned route back to home looks now this:
We will be basically following the western coastline of Europe and we will be driving ~6400 kilometers.
From Almendralejo our only goal was to be in the Jerez de la Frontera airport when my family was arriving at 10:25. We managed to drive the last kilometers with good speed and arrived at the airport 10:15 where we found out that the plane from Finland had arrived earlier and they were already walking out from the airport!
Good timing.
Last day driving was only 299 kilometers.
When leaving Andorra TomTom was telling us that we are going to get lot of kilometers for this day. We decided to take the middle route instead of following the coast line which was our original plan.
We drove 978 kilometers during this day from Andorra to Almendralejo, Spain. Only issue during this leg was that there was quite a strong side wind and lots of trucks on the roads.
From Aubagne we started driving towards Andorra, but on the half way of the trip we started already changing our route a bit, instead of following the original plan we told the TomTom to take us directly to Andorra. This took us to really nice mountain roads with turns that I could hardly drive my bike in there! But it was really worth it.
Finally we got to Andorra for the night, our original plan was to continue even further, but as it was already getting quite late we decided to stay in there for the night.
489 kilometers for this day.
After a good night sleep we started driving again, this time we decided that we take slowly and move to small roads.
Ended up driving only 534 kilometers during the second day, but especially the first 140 kilometers from Piacenza to Genoa were really nice small roads. From there on the traffic was hurting us badly.
We found an nice hotel in Aubagne to spend the night.
Time to summarize our day trips.
Our first day trip was 2656 kilometers according to Microsoft Autoroute 2007, but there is one possible error (point number 4) where our gas station receipt and GPS coordinates are giving us an location which is not really on our route... need to figure out what has happened...
We started 7:24 in the morning from Tallinn and started driving either Iron Butt SS1000 or BB1500 and now when looking back it seems that we got 2500K.
Roads were in pretty excellent during the whole trip, except small parts in Via Baltic route. Italy was the one that we do not miss, hands are even now after few days we stopped driving still hurting the fact that you can not release your hands from the bike, it is illegal over there! When looking at other bikers this really looks to be something that they obey, no local bikers were waving their hands, everybody was keeping them on the bike.
Finally got shortly connected and updated some route information.
We left 30.6.2007 7:24 from Tallinn (number 1) and ended up driving a bit more than 2600 kilometers into city called Piacenza (number 13), Italy by 1.7.2007 20:00.
From Piacenza we continued toward France and currently we are in the city of Aubagne (number 20) near Marseille, France.
We now have ~3200 kilometers behind.
Today we will drive to Andorra, Spain and continue even further.
