I hadn’t owned a car since my summer car broke down the previous August in a very remote corner of Finland and I sold it for scrap. And I really hadn’t missed my car since then. Although I had moved again the previous autumn, I still lived in a very central location in the capital region. Because of the traffic, lack of parking spaces and expensive parking, owning a car here is a nuisance. And thanks to an efficient public transport system there is no need for one.
This didn’t prevent me from making up an April Fool’s Day joke about having bought an identical car to the one I had the previous summer. And I went on telling, I would again try to visit all current and former municipalities during one summer, like i did the previous one until my car failed me just before the end.
It was one of my best April Fool’s Day jokes of all time. Everybody believed the story. Most people said, that they had been certain all the time, that I would try to conquer Finland in one summer again.
That was when I realized that I actually missed having a summer car. I missed driving to sunsets, I missed urbexing. I missed everything about the previous summer. I shared this in my Instagram stories and things started to escalate pretty quickly.
I had a friend contact me. She said her old Volvo would sit idle for the summer as she was cruising around in her own summer car. We agreed, that I would hire the Volvo for the summer and return it in the autumn. And less than a month later I went to pick this beauty up.
She is a mid-90’s Volvo 960, the flagship of the manufacturer. All the best equipment, all the latest technology and most comfort. And of course a 6-cylinder engine.
So this is what my office would look like in the coming summer. Something so familiar, something completely new.
But this summer I wasn’t going to tour all the municipalities. I had three weeks of paid leave and a long list of locations I wanted to visit. I decided to make several road trips to Finland with a long list of abandoned places. This would be the urbex summer of a lifetime.