Usually I go to Finland by car. It is more than 900 km from my city to Rovaniemi. I use Hollywood bike rack to mount bikes. It is very easy and fast to install this rack on a back door of a car.
On a gas station:
I haven't been to Rovaniemi before. I was very surprised visiting Lapland! It differs much from southern Finland. Driving a car in the night was very hard, because there are lots of deer and elks running across the road.
Rovaniemi is situated close to arctic circle, but there was a very good weather during the competition. 20C and sunny all the weekend.
There were 6 different trails. Each trail was ridden twice. Overall 12 special stages. The trails were absolutely different. All of them had big number of roots, stones and turns. I liked the tracks more than tracks at Messila, cause they were more various.
Ounasvaara has a very comfortable chair lift. Going to the top is taking about 9 minutes, so there is some time to eat a banana and take some sun baths between the rides.
This was my first ride in Finland with clipless pedals. Riding enduro on flats was rather uncomfortable in Messila, that's why I had decided to try clipless pedals.
Clipless pedals had given me better control of a bike, but I also had made rather big mistakes when I couldn't clip in on the track. As a result I was 50th of 60 riders. There were less rookie rider in Ounasvaara than in Messila. Completily all of the riders had enduro bikes. My trail bike (Corratec X-Force 2012) was not as good for these tracks as an enduro bike, but I've got really great pleasure riding the trails, and I'm very happy that I had decided to visit Rovaniemi.
Again big thanks to Kosti Kostinen for these great photos:
Stage #2/5:
The most hard stage for me. This photo is made a few seconds before a fall down.
Stage #7/10:
Stage #2/5:
awesome photos and awesome story, man!
ReplyDeleteThanks ) But my English becomes rather poor. This blog is the only way I can practice my English
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