I have always worried about how I could tell my location in the middle of a forest if I needed emergency asistance. Quite often I’m in paths with no name, or even paths not mapped by Google. A friend of mine gave me the answer: the Finnish 112 app, available for Android, iPhone and Windows Mobile. When you make an emergency call with the app, the emergency services automatically get your location. You can also specify your spoken language, english among them. You can read instructions in english here.
Fortunatelly, I haven’t tried it and I hope I don’t ever have to.
This time I tried my luck west of Espoo. It’s not so populated as the north of Helsinki, but I couldn’t find any lonely forest. Most of the trip went on main dirt and asphalt roads, with homes and farms here and there. Not the best area, but not bad either. There were a couple of extreme spots that almost made me fall of the bike.
I filled the tank at a gas station that had an old pump on display.
A bit of the 1130 west and I left the asphalt for the first time by taking Solvikinkaari and Björkebergantie. Not a long stage but the gravel and stones at the middle made it interesting.
The first of the spots is here. Right before reaching Vaanilantie, the path is not mantained for vehicles and it went down a slope with some slippery mud.
The second difficult spot is Laakspohjan kartano, because it is covered with sand. Another slope made my bike shake both sides, but there was also a beatiful part surrounded by trees.
This road has sand and shadow trees because it is used by the horses of a big farm next for it, and for that reason I won’t go there by motorbike again and I encourage you not to do it.
At that point I was near the center of Lohja, so I thought it was better to leave that populated area by taking road 25 south and then check Lohjansaarentie. The later is a curly, but it’s a busy road that goes through residential areas.
I changed my heading to north-east, along Päivöläntie, Knapantie and Siggansintie, same type of dirt roads. Right after crossing under the rail tracks I found a more challenging, but short, dead-end forest path. I took the picture below here.
At that point I was mostly heading to highway E18 to go back home, so I took a bit of road 116 south-east and Niemenkyläntie north. The only interesting thing about these asphalt roads were the views of fields and forests.
The last dirt road of the day was Lieviöntie, same as others of the day but with more traffic as I was getting closer to populated areas.