We didn't take exactly the right road leaving Nikel. We followed a sign pointing to Murmansk, and it turns out it actually was pointing to the shortest route to Murmansk, but definitely not to the fastest or most travelled route to Murmansk. It was mostly empty, and the clouds and snow made it difficult to see some details on the road, such as unexpected large piles of snow in the middle of it. Normally when we hit one of these it was possible to plow through, but one caused so much snow to fly over the entire car that I had to stop because it was impossible to see. Amazingly, the little car managed to get going again without any trouble. At one point during the hours spent crawling along this road, we flagged down a plow driver and managed to confirm that we were heading towards Murmansk, and that something would happen in about 50 km (that was about as far as we could get in Russian). In the end, we reached a better road and made it to Murmansk without any trouble.