Originally Posted by
cyclezealot
Thank you very much Juha for all the work you put into your response.. Finland is one of the parts of the EU we've yet to explore.. The two lake districts look very appealing.. We might even get to Scandinavia this coming September.. If Ryan air does not have a terribly restrictive policy towards bikes .
I'm going to split hairs here a little bit with Finland being part of Scandinavia. Geographically speaking, it's part of the general Scandinavian land mass. But culturally, ethnically, and especially linguistically, it's not. Finns (as well as Estonians and Hungarians) have their ethnic roots in central Asia, and their languages are Finno-Ugric, not Indo-European. I used to get corrected on this all the time by my Finnish wife.
It's worth visiting. Especially the lake country. My wife's family is from Alajarvi (my keyboard doesn't support umlauts, so I can't spell it correctly). It's a great cycling location. The roads are in very good repair, and the drivers we encountered were very courteous. No real climbs, though. All rolling hills.