Due to early flight I spent Saturday night at the Heathrow Radisson Blu hotel. They did a deal with 8 days parking which was very reasonable. At a most unpleasant hour I caught the bus to the terminal for the uneventful flight to Stockholm. The plane was only about 1/3 full.
Whilst in Stockholm airport I tried to make use of their free WiFi. Now, I know that my travel laptop is old and weird, but it has worked fine in many places. Unfortunately, it only has the Opera web browser and this refused to connect to the WiFi login page as it claimed it was insecure. Only by turning off all of Opera’s security checking could I get it to work. Unfortunately, I managed this only seconds before needing to board the flight to Oulu.
I was hoping to catch the 15:10 bus from Oulu to Jurmu, but this was always going to be tight – even with a taxi – with an arrival time of 14:40 and this timing fell apart when a delayed departure from Stockholm. I therefore took a bus to Oulu centre and then spent a very long time waiting for the 18:40 to Oulu. The bus station hall was shut, but fortunately I was able to shelter in the adjoining cafe.
Despite selling me a ticket to Jurmu, the driver didn’t stop when we got there. I have never had this problem before! Fortunately, I was able to call Timo and the re-directed Milla to pick me up from the stop in Taivalkoski.
I had previously agreed with Timo that following their disastrous fire in October which destroyed the guest accommodation, I would spend the first night in Kylkeinan and she said that as I was quite late she would drive me straight there and that she had my meal with her.
Well, I coped, but it took even longer than normal to light the fire. Primarily this was because I couldn’t find the axe and therefore was rather short of kindling.