We land the heli in the garden of a little hotel just outside of Stockholm for the night. It’s now 1 am and the last rays of light are just fading away. The first day from Paris to Berlin had us dodging some very low clouds and early evening fog in the mountains of Belgium and southern Germany, which made for some very interesting flying. The second day from Berlin to Stockholm was ideal, with a 15 knot tailwind and puffy cumulus clouds that seemed to shower down rainbows on thousands of little islands on the west coast of Sweden.

Tomorrow we head to Helsinki where we will pick up our Russian navigator who will help us get into Russia via St. Petersburg and then accompany us all the way to eastern Siberia. Getting permits to enter Russia has been a 6 month project, and we still don’t have anything in writing that says we can enter. Our contact person in Moscow tells us that everything is 99% approved for our entry into Russia, but it is the last 1% that has us concerned. We won’t really know until we file our flight plan to cross the border.