This year's travel/explore was to the cities just above Mikkeli in South Central Finland (along the 5 route): Juva, Joroinen, Varkaus, Virtasalmi, Haukivuori.
We were armed with the GE road map and also a great travel guide book to all of Finland. The map has points of interest marked and the guidebook gives us a history of every location, including cultural, architectural, and natural points of interest. First stop with every City is the ABC on the highway - they always have brochures, pamphlets and better maps to the area than the big books do.
JUVA
First stop was Juva, a small town on the Juva lake (natch). The City website: http://www.juva.fi/index.php?id=288 There's a lot of history and prehistory in the town area and an interesting 'route' laid out for a day of being a tourist. The "gottlund's circle" includes mansions, sites of interest, and some prehistoric man sites along the lake. http://www.juva.fi/index.php?id=135 Juva definitely was the most tourist friendly of all the towns we visited.
Our first destination was the Partala mansion, which in the 1600s was taken over by King Gustaf of Sweden with the goal of showing the Finns how to make an ideal argricultural center. But it was so badly mismanaged and lost so much money that Gustaf's successor gave it back to the original owners. The grounds include a museum and a 100 year old parish building in the woods.
We drove by the old cemetery with the windmill and headed to Gottlund's tupa, a small little building that was home in the 1800s to one of Juva's most high profile residents. The Tupa is on the lake and in a nice location - but honestly, if you've been to Seurasaari, you've seen the building before. What was neat was that a couple who lived there saw us gawking and gave us a history of what had burned down in the last 100 years and why the Tupa was the only building left of what was once a very interesting cultural landmark area. After the barn and outlying buildings burned down, a subdivision was built right next to it - kind of destroying the ambiance.
We then drove to a small finger of land between two lakes. The area had a rich history for prehistoric archeology finds. We treked past yet another new subdivsion, which had dug up the entire lake front area, only to find a market saying that there was a rich archeology history and to not take home any ceramics or artifacts we may see on the ground. That was kind of a pointless trip. Just as we returned to the car, the rain began. So we checked out the very interesting stone block church designed by Engel and a jugendstile museum house.
Here are a couple shots of the lake area where the prehistory sites are - the first two are shots of the park area where the Gottlund's Tupa is located. The second is where the prehistory site plaque is - see how a beach was created and the forest dug up?
Other places we didn't' stop at (because they were closed) were the Wolf Park - a place that breeds wolves and wolf-dog hybrids, the Karjalainen museum, and the wood sculpture studio of a local artist.
JOROINEN
We drove up to Joroinen, just north of Juva. This was a beautiful little hillside town, very wealthy from agriculture and transportation, that was known as the "Paris of Savo" because it had a huge number of mansions in the area (14, I believe). Unfortunately, they are all privately owned. Our first stop was marked as an old mill (1800s) and finding it was quite an adventure. We finally had to go up a private driveway of a fishery, marked 'protected by dog', but we did find the darn thing. It was kind of cool - made completely out of stone and now mostly a very overgrown ruin. Due to the state of the building, we didn't approach it. Due to the mosquitos and nettles, we didn't go around it, either
But it was on a beautiful river leading to Joroinen's lake.
VARKAUS
There wasn't much else to see in Joroinen, so we drove up to Varkaus. Varkaus is a fairly major city whose downtown is several huge UPM industral plants. We ate lunch at the Koti Pizza (it was Saturday after Juhannus and nothing else was open!) where we partook of the 'World's Greatest Pizza" winner. We then drove down to the tourist attraction we were most interested in seeing - the locks. Here's Wikipedia's little history entry of Varkaus:
The town is located on straits between two parts of Lake Saimaa. An extension of the Saimaa Canal passes through the town. The town became an industrial center in the end of the 19th century with the A. Ahlström paper mills. During the Finnish Civil War in 1918 the the town was taken over by the "Reds", but because of its isolated location in rural Finland, it was soon taken by the "Whites".
Varkuas' lock system was first built in the 1800s out of rough hewn square blocks. Then in 1919 a newer and better lock system was built - this time sponsored by the Finnish government. It's still in operation today - we watched a sailboat patiently waiting for the locks to open. Here are some images from MTV3 about the city:
The industral plants in the distance
The old locks
The new lock system
The City has some natural areas as well. But the other fun thing to do was to go over the huge expansion bridge with an astonishing view of the entire City. It's about as high as I've ever driven anywhere in Finland
In all, I would have liked to have spent more time exploring the city.VIRTASALMI
Next stop was Virtasalmi. This is a tiny village between Varkaus and Haukivuori. The town decided to create their own unique brand of tourism and so put the elderly to work making a full scale miniature of all the important buildings of the town's history. Many had long since burned down but they used the museum yard as to-scale representation of the area and all the buildings were created from historic records, photos, and plans. The nearby bar was rather noisy, however, and the town is mostly known for its motopark.
The church - burned down many years ago:
The biggest mansion in the area:
HAUKIVUORI
Our last stop was Haukivuori. Nothing much is in the town but the church village contains a 1930s era building and is situated on a lovely bay. The church had put on a large bonfire every year but merged with the Mikkeli parish and so the bonfire was moved - darn. There are also quite a few sandy beaches in the area. Fishing is the big sport, however.
Then it was a 20 minute drive back to Mikkeli.
