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Arctic Circle and Nearby

October 6 and 7, 2001

Rovaniemi, Finland

Dear Friends and Family,

Now that we're here for a day or two, what to do? We are, after all, tourists and tourists have to go see the kitschy tourist places. First, we head to Santapark. Santo does live in Lapland you know. Several of the tourist guides assured us that's the case.

However, when we got to his Park, we found he and all of Santapark were on vacation until November 23rd. What a deal. The guy works for about a month and then spends the rest of the year on furlough in the Bahamas or somewhere Not only that, but he left his not-so-little reindeers behind. (Picture #01)

Fortunately, there are plenty of touristy places left operating so we went up the road to Santa's Village and the Arctic Circle monument. This time the Village was open for business but not crowded. Not crowded at all. There was parking for hundreds of cars but today, including ours, I counted about six. But this meant Marianne and I could get up close to the official marker. (Picture #02) Inside, she could even straddle the official Circle. (Picture #03).

(There will be a prize for the first fan that can tell everyone why the Circle is where it is - 66 degrees, 32+ minutes north latitude.)

After this highlight, it was pretty quiet at Santa's too. We did pick up a bottle of wine made just a few feet north of the Circle. It's made from a mix of berries and, to our surprise, was actually drinkable. I don't think Burgundy or Napa has anything to worry about but the concept of a wine from around here is remarkable.

Back in Rovaniemi, the other must-see is the "Arctikum". Our Tourist Information guide had said this was worth two to four hours and she was right. It is a museum of things arctic, housed in a wonderful building (Picture #04) on the banks of the Ounasjoki River. The displays are all very informative (English explanations help) and quite realistic. There are areas for the arctic environment worldwide, for arctic natives, for economic development of the far north and separate rooms specializing with Lappish history, clothing and life. It did indeed take us more than a couple hours to work our way through everything. Marianne even visited a typical Lappish tent and concluded that it wasn't so bad. She's been cooped up in the car too long I'm afraid.

The rest of our stay in Rovaniemi was not too remarkable. We discovered that nothing happens on Sunday - not even the hotel rooms are cleaned. No stores were open and not even the Internet Cafe was working. This last was a just one more blow to our search for a solution to "the email/website problem". Other than via a couple of $25 phone calls back to our internet provider in Ukraine, we have been "net-less" and not happy about it. (Obviously, if you are reading this, we have solved the problem. If you are not, I'm writing this diary for myself - just like a normal diary is written I guess.)

We tried to catch some news about the War on Terror. We've been without newspapers for several days and were currently without TV news as well. The hotel desk clerk was chatting with us when the radio he was listening to broke in with the news of the start of bombing. He translated the on-air headline and we realized we really missed CNN International. We were so news-starved that we went to the room and listened to the French channel because at least it had the news and we could see the fuzzy green pictures of war in low-light pictures that have become familiar to CNN viewers.

We discovered that we were both worried about the upcoming mountain crossing into Norway 250 miles north of where we are now. We also discovered that we are not comfortable with the situation when we are both worried. But we don't really have any options but to do things that may be uncomfortable. Intellectually we know that's a way to grow but emotionally we just worry, complain to each other, and then feel bad because we've made the other feel bad.

Maybe we don't need to worry.

Regards and pray for both the normal, innocent citizens of Afghanistan and for the service men and women who need to go in harm's way to eliminate the source of the evil perpetrated on September 11th, 2001.

John and Marianne

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Completed October 9, 2001

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