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Rovaniemi (F) to Sangis (S)

Monday 1st august 2005

Last night it started to rain again after the nice weather we had last evening. This morning first had breakfast, then hit the showers and took the Elise to find some new rear tires. We got two tips from the campsite reception for shops to look at. After driving around for a bit we found the site full with car related companies. We settled for Lapin Kumi, as they had the Bandag logo just like Roline :)

Inside it all looked ok, just like a real tire shop.

First we asked which brands they had in 225/45R17. They had a number of brands but no Toyo. So Arno settled for the cheapest, which were the Pirelli’s P-Zero Rosso Asymetrico’s.
Then the Elise could enter garage 4.

Ofcourse we had to make clear that they can’t use the lift for the Elise, but had to use a jack. Fortunatly they had a jack that could fit under the Elise, the same brand as we have ourselves. Put a piece of rubber between the jack and the chassis and lift the car.

You can clearly see that the tires needed replacing. The upper two are the old Toyo’s. Esspecially the lower one is allmost really slick.

What is also fun to see, is that the negative camber (allmost -3 degrees) and the toe (50 minutes toe in) which the car is running with, doesn’t have an extreme effect on the wear of the tire. Below you see what’s left of the profile afer more than 20000km.

Fitting and balancing was all done neatly.

And torque it up ofcourse.

We were finished pretty quick, around 09:30 local time we drove away to the super market to get our supplies. On the parkinglot we checked the tirepressure. Allthough the mechanic checked the pressure of the old tires, he probably thought it was too low. He had put 2.7 Bar in the new ones (same on both sides). So we let some air out to get them to 1.8 Bar.

After the supermarked we did some shopping at Santa as we were close there anyway. Then we headed back to the campsite.
Fortunatly it had stopped raining. So we could take our time to dry off the tents and pack everything up.
When we settled the bill we went to Rauna, to the Arctic Zoo. Unfortunatly the good weather didn’t last long. On our way there we had some more rain.

When we arrived in Rauna the rain got a bit less. With some drops we could walk through the zoo pretty much dry.

Right after visiting the zoo we had lunch in the parking lot. After lunch we went on our way again. Timing was pretty good, not even 10 minutes after leaving we had some real heavy rain.

Around 15:30 we drove on the E75 to Kemi, when all traffic stopped. We were in the middle of a traffic jam in Lapland! And it wasn’t a small one, because only at 16:15 things started to move again. It seemed the be road works, they were resurfacing a bit of the road.

Just a half hour later, we crossed the border with Sweden.

The weather got a bit better, so we tried to find a campsite. In Sangis we found one that didn’t do tents, but as we both liked relax and have a cabin we decided to take one.

After first making some dinner, we sat outside in the sun planning the route for tomorrow and enjoying the weather.

We tried if we could pick up some tv signal, to see if we could find some news or weather forecasts.

And we finally did on stv 2, around 21:15 then broadcast the weatherforecast! The good news is that tomorrow should be a nice day, but after that weather will be pretty bad. Oh well, we’ll see tomorrow.

After updating the website, relaxed a little and off to bed.

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