We come from a small country, me and Ellis. It\u2019s almost comically small. Driving from one side to the other only takes a couple of hours and so every distance we have to travel for things like work, visiting family, seeing a band, seems long. Sometimes excruciatingly so. An hours commute to work? You have to be kidding me! Driving nearly two hours to get to Ellis\u2019 parents? Pull someone else\u2019s leg! I mean, they have a swimming pool and all, but is it worth the trip? Think again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that comically small country, it\u2019s crowded. I mean, put us all on a big pile and you get\u2026well, I don\u2019t know and I don\u2019t think we should try. But there\u2019s a lot of us, Dutch folks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Scandinavian countries we\u2019ve been traveling through, they have always felt bigger to me. That\u2019s probably because they are, but also, it felt like there should be more of \u2018them\u2019. The Netherlands have 17 million people squeezed into this tiny piece of land? Then surely there\u2019ll be millions and millions more of them. So when we drove into Finland last week I expected to find some people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, if you haven\u2019t caught up to where I\u2019m going with this: there\u2019s nearly no one here. You can drive for miles and miles and not find a single soul. So I did some hard online research, opened Wikipedia and read\u20265,5 million people. That\u2019s not even a third of home. What do they do with all this extra land? Is it just no man\u2019s land? Acres of untouched, raw, natural beauty? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, it\u2019s some of that. But we also found something else. We found a national obsession at the end of each road, the edge of every lake and at the foot of every hill. It\u2019s summer homes. Endless and endless numbers of summer homes. And yes, they all\u2014truly all\u2014have a sauna. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finland is the land of everyman\u2019s right, and it seems everyman\u2019s right is to own a summer home.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We come from a small country, me and Ellis. It\u2019s almost comically small. Driving from one side to the other only takes a couple of hours and so every distance we have to travel for things like work, visiting family, seeing a band, seems long. Sometimes excruciatingly so. An hours commute to work? You have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1920,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"countries":[],"class_list":["post-2177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-category-journal"],"yoast_head":"\n