LJNEPM-diary

Larppi jonka nimeä ei pidä mainittaman päiväkirjoja joita löysin s-postilaatikkoni kätköistä.

Älvdaeln supply run

Recently we did a delivery run from Turku to Åsen and from there to Sodankylä.

Our trip began on Wednesday 19.04. by taking our new truck to the registration inspection in Turku. At first they told us to get an certificate that our cargo compartment was securely attached. After producing required papers (the guy at the place took a good look, said OK and wrote us a paper) we added some reflectors to the rear and fixed the rear license plate lights (remember kids, don't put 12 volt bulbs to an 24 volt socket)

Otherwise the truck was in surprisingly good condition. Only real problem was that occasionally the pneumatic system sounded like Darth Vader making and sexual-harassment phone call.

But any ways. We got the licence plate that said OUI, almost like 'yes' in French, that seemed like a good sign. We picked up Johannes, who was going to be the driver for the trip and then we started packing our stuff. Three tons of plywood and 50 wooden barrels were taken from shops in Turku and then we went to our dragon workshop in Loimaa to load some props, cloth and industrial washing machine (kitchen duty by the next building camp will be so much nicer thanks to that)

At 22:00 we managed something amazing, we were in port on schedule, and got to the ferry without incident.

The Finnlink ferry was quite nice, it had plenty of good food and because it didn't have tax-free alcohol the usual horde of drunks was thankfully absent.

After a short night's sleep we arrived to Sweden. It was an early morning so the road were empty, only a lonely swan gazed us from the sea while we rumbled over the bridge.

The first breakdown of the trip occurred by 9:20 between Gävle and Falun. We stopped for a break stop and the car didn't start again.

After spending three hours in the cold rain trying to start the car we decided that we can't fix it, so we called some help. After a while a friendly repairman came with a towing tuck, gave us some electricity for our battery and took all of our money with him. But at least we could continue our voyage.

Arrival to Älvdalen happened at 1700 and I realized that I didn't have a key to the Åsens old village school, that was our secret base, with me. After a few frantic phone calls we managed to get the caretaker of the old school to let us in so we could unload our stuff.

Naturally, it rained all the time.

By midnight we had unloaded the car and were cold, tired, miserable and wet, no necessarily in that order. The electric heater we had with us was totally inadequate to warm the room we were staying so we just tucked in to our sleeping bags and hoped that we wouldn't die of pneumonia.

The morning came and somehow we managed to get ourselves up and running. The truck didn't start but Johannes McGyvered the battery with the cable from our inverter and we were ready to go on.

First stop was at the Wedde’s sawmill. We left the plywood there and prepared the truck for our wood load. We couldn't get the rear loading ramp to function so there was quite a lot more stuff in the rear of the truck that was intended. Unloading the plywood was quite tricky since our trucks sides were solid, so that all had to be loaded from the back.

Finally we managed to tie some lines to our plywood load and drag it off from the truck.

The loading of the wood was much harder. The wood came in five meter long piles one meter wide and high. The forklift trucks the sawmill had had only about one meter long fork, easy to use if you load truck from the side but almost impossible from the rear.

Finally we managed to load the wood to our truck using two forklifts to hold the woodpiles and caterpillar to shove it all in. In all the loading took about four hours.

We continued our journey, I had checked our route from the map but when we got to our road we noticed that it had several hills. Our truck was fully loaded and we managed to do something like 30 kilometres per hour when going uphill.

Several hours later we managed to clear the hills and got to the E4 road that runs along the Swedish coast. Then we discovered that the jury-rigging in our battery was failing and the truck wouldn’t probably start again if we stopped the engine.

At that point we had about one thousand kilometres to go.

The road was open and long, luckily I didn’t have to drive since I didn’t have a drivers license. We were tired and tried to keep awake by talking, we hope that no one had hidden a microphone to our truck, the things we talked about were as disturbed as could be expected in such a situation.

I passed out sometime after two in the morning and woke up at five, I made the legendary question “What country, what currency?” and Johannes replied that unfortunately we were still in Sweden.

Few hours later we arrived to Finnish border, it had a large sign that said that we had arrived to the city of Tornio and the province of Lapland, under those there was a smaller sign that told us, almost like an afterthought, that this was also the republic of Finland.

After stopping for the stop sign on the border, (witch was pretty much the only thing that had to be done at the border) we had “only” 230 kilometres to go.

Another screw up happened nine at the morning. We were running low on fuel so we drove to the gas station and Johannes lifted his foot from the clutch and stalled the engine. There we were then, in middle of Lapland with a truck that couldn’t start. Luckily we managed to get hold of local repair shop and a friendly farmer pulled our truck so that we could start the engine. It seemed that in north people were much more ready to help us. But then again if the gas stations have approximately hundred kilometres between them, it is quite natural to help other drivers on the road.

The fixing of the battery cost us about 10 euros, quite a cheap price when compared how much pain and suffering it had caused us.

Three hours later we arrived to Timo’s place where we were taking the wood from the sawmill. At this point we were quite tired but we still had a return trip to make. Luckily for us, it consisted of a bus trip to Rovaniemi, a train to Tampere and another train to Turku.