Finland for lunch

We're getting ready to go from St. Petersburg (and update the blog) and would you believe there is a Russian version of Married with Children? The laugh track is horrible, but the fill-ins for Peggy and Al Bundy are pretty good!
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We’re about to leave St. Petersburg, however we want to update the blog due to the undue concern out there about our silence. We’ve just been running non-stop or sleeping and the internet connection has been unreliable. It’s 8:30am and we managed to get directions out of the city from a non-english speaking driver out front. We did get lost a few times but managed to find the main road within 30 minutes of searching. After our past experiences we were pleasantly surprised at the excellent condition of the roads between St. Petersburg and the Finland border.

The road between St. Petersbug and the Russian/Finland border is excellent. Here you can see our typical passing zone between the trucks. The drivers, while not as curtious as Poland, always gave us as much room as possible. As you can see here - it wasn't much by US standards.
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The border crossing was relatively easy. We had all of the paperwork handy (most of it was generated going into Russia). Jon even got cocky and when the border control guard asked what color his bike was he said “Red, like your hair.” She smiled, but a new friend of ours also in line was very concerned that a statement like that can cause BIG problems. We had none, but between the extra paperwork for the bikes and the two girls trying to hitch rides with us we had traffic pretty blocked up for a while. When we finally reached the gate crossing they waved us through happy to see us go.

Approaching the Russian exit border control
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We made it through the Finnish border and hit the road. The Finnish customs was like night and day as compared to Russia and it was quite systematic and easy. Today was definitely one of the nicest days yet weather wise and we really enjoyed the beautiful ride through the countryside.

After about 40 minutes from crossing the border we decided we were hungry and we stopped at a little strip shopping center with some friendly guys hanging out front. In the strip there was a quaint bakery run by a young woman (who was also the baker) who spoke perfect English. At this point, other than the guides – and that was a stretch, no one had spoken perfect English to us in a while. We felt like after we crossed the border, suddenly everyone could speak English again. She was very sweet, explaining all of the Finnish baked items, and we created a smorgasbord for lunch.

Alex trying to get through the border. Jon has been cleared. It only took us about 30 minutes to get through. Note that we did pass about 1/4 mile of parked cars waiting to get through.
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Helsinki looked like a neat place to explore, but we really didn’t have time to do so. We went right over to the port and made sure we were in line for the cruise ship, ready to go to Stockholm.