Sounds interesting, all of that! Feel free to share a montage of your trip - maybe post a link in the comments if the montage is somewhere available for the wide public. Or then just find a way to send a personal message to me.

Fellow adventurers are welcome to visit my place. I live some 14 km away from the nearest railway station, and from there it is almost direct train connection to the capital city, so my corner of the countryside is relatively easy to visit. Another reason to send a personal message so that we can co-ordinate when you start planning your possible visit to Finland.

Hehe, I don't know if there are more saunas than there are cars. Probably the numbers are about the same. Especially when there also are vans which have a sauna built-in =)

But this winter has been more like just moody prolonged autumn. During my lifetime the effects of the global climate change have been clearly visible and growing. This winter we have had two (yes, exactly 2, no more) days with properly freezing temperatures. When I was a child the winter with sub-freezing temperatures and a lot of snow, that started in mid-November and lasted until April or May. For the last ten years or so it has been more like winter starting towards the end of December. And this year the winter has not been that much of a winter at all. (At my latitude, that is. Up in the Lapland they still do have a winter, luckily.) That is how the winter has been, and it doesn't make me happy. But, luckily, on personal levels I have my ways of coping when the world is not what I'd like it to be, so I've been doing mostly OK.