Can be found here:

http://longway.to/gallery/default.aspx?aid=33

We drove 600 km today and in total the Ford has been driven 4037 km so far without problems, except for the flat…

All the raining and snowing yesterday made the car almost look clean again. 800 km drive today to Åbo and the ferry to Stockholm.

We have so far driven about 3231 km…

Monchegorsk is a small town south of Murmansk where nickel is processed and the mountains are open for skiing in wintertime. There is also a military airbase slightly north of town and you can hear the fighters take of and land all the time. So there are plenty of sights to visit..

The mandatory entrence sign of any russian (or ex soviet) city

The big moose of Monchegorsk

And the Russian orthodox church of Monchegorsk

The size of our tub in hotelroom

A nice MIG, after sneaking quite close to airbase

The sights

Hanging in Laplandia

We decided to do some realy touristy things, we visited the nuclear powered icebreaker Lenin. There are 10 atom icebreakers in the world, they are all russian and all are registered in Murmansk. They cannot operate in warmer water than 10 degrees Celsius. Lenin was built in the 1950′s and is now a museum.

Then suddenly on the snowy bumpy road full of holes one of the tires couldn’t take it any more.. In the middle of the snowstorm it decided to fail..

But a good mechanic is always prepared:

fortunately we are carrying 2 extra wheels..

Its good to have a cameraman who can help you take pictures in situations like this.

From Murmansk we headed out on an expedition on the Kola Peninsula to visit some abandoned places. We took the car north towards Barents sea again, but this time driving in Russia not Norway. So suddenly the road just ended and we had to drive 100 km offroad..

There are severeal powerstations in the middle of nowhere on the Kola peninsula..

Some worrying signs along the road…

Entering a truly isolated half abandoned town

Some abandoned buildings

after a five hour drive to the middle of nowhere, suddenly a polar snowstorm struck us. it was practically snowing from the side, everything whent white. We decided to turn back to murmansk..

We decided to do some views and visited a great WW2 monument, also got some “nice” view of the city from above.
On our way down from the mountain we went into a abandoned building in the middle of a resident area. There is a thin line between abandoned and inhabited here…

We reached Murmansk quite late in the evening, unfortunately Navigon did not have Murmansk at all luckily CoPilot had downtown. This is the world’s largest city north of the Arctic circle, population 300 000.
We found our hotel and had a very late dinner and a beer.

Right now we had driven 1799 km since we left Stockholm.

About 250km, 4h drive… Not much to see, except for a lot of WW2 monuments, all 4 of these in same crossing.