Wednesday, 23 July 2014

Round the Gulf of Bothnia

According to the books today would be train, bus, walk, bus, train to get us from Oulu to Boden.  In doing so we'd travel about 280km right round the top of the Gulf and going back into Sweden for the first time since we left Stockholm on the ferry to Finland.

Givens me of the track work and minor delays we've had here and there, we decided to take the morning train rather than the later one which theoretically would still work but if we were late at any point might have been problematic.

As it turned out, everything went really smoothly.  Not long after arriving at Kemi Station, an elderly coach showed up for Tornio and we hopped on board.  The rail tickets also work on the connecting buses... We'd expected to gave to get off and walk across the bridge between Finland and Sweden but the bus delivered us right to the bus station in Haparanda next to the Northern-most IKEA in the world.  

Here the bus loaded up with "Buss-Gods" before taking on its passengers.  A ver modern double decker coach with an extremely chatty driver wended its way down to Lulea stopping at quite a few bus stops and small bus stations on the way to pick up and drop off passengers.  It's final destination was Umea about 400km away so quite a journey for some.  

We decided to have lunch in town before taking the train up to Boden.  Having found a nice spot which was serving a business lunch, we sat down to eat and decided it would be a good idea to check train times.  Given it was just half an hour up the line, we expected them to be quite frequent but the choice was 30 minutes or 3 hours later.  We ate quickly! 

Arriving in Boden our hotel was 50 yards from the station which given our original booking was for 0612 was handy.  As it turned out that train had been cancelled and we would leave at 11AM instead - fine by us.



It was a terribly hot evening so we took a slow stroll into town.  There was a very nice park with a lake and a riverside walk as well as a small shopping area.  We bought picnic supplies and went back to the hotel.  A quiet evening with Grand Designs with Swedish subtitles on the TV.  Surprisingly we slept pretty well as there was no cooling in the hotel.

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