Little chapter break hiking picture post.
It's the midway mark of the chapter break and I'm back and rested from my short hike last week, so here's a tiny summery blog update. The SSSS books should arrive next week on a still unspecified day, I'll put up another post then. (The person at the printer who was going to let me know the exact date left for their summer vacation, eep! x3)
So hey, I went on a small two-day forest hike with my mom as my summer vacation! Which you already knew because I said I would on Tuesday.
Even though I've spent plenty of time walking in the woods my whole life, but I've never actually gone properly hiking. The last time I even slept in a tent was as a kid, which I don't even remember so it doesn't count. But now it was time to learn the basics, because me, my mom and my aunt have kind of decided to go hiking in Iceland next summer, and while my aunt and mom are pretty much life long hiking experts I didn't even know how to handle the darn gas cooker. Now I do. Anyway, pictures:
On top of learning some hiking basics we had to also make sure I'm actually able to carry my share of the equipments, which is about 10kg+ of stuff. Which was a bit doubtful due to me being a weakling twig with no muscles! (Spolier alert: Turns out I can carry it.) The terrain was fortunately very forgiving and relatively easy to plow through which helped me not fail and die in the woods.
Lots of forest, easy to climb rocky hills and mossy ridges. As you can probably see it was a quite wet two days. Which was nice, the day temperatures stayed between 13 and 18 degreed celcius, and even that felt a bit too hot now and then. I've actually been quite pleased with the chilly weather this summer, temperatures above 20 degrees should be contained in the sauna. (I know this cool summer has been pretty much a death punch for a lot of struggling businesses in Finland though, especially with the recession already steamrolling everything, so that's sad of course.)
Between every ridge and hill was a tiny piece of wetland, usually with a little pond in the middle. The hillside where we set up camp for the night overlooked one of these pretty little marsh ponds.
So remember Lalli's dream space and the silly planks many of you were asking about? Those are the kind of planks that they were. They're called "pitkospuut" in Finnish ("pitkin" meaning "along" and "puu" meaning "tree, wood") they're basically a simple type of boardwalk for crossing different types of wetlands or areas that flood periodically. They're just wide enough for one person to walk on with one plank for each foot, and if you need to let someone pass you go stand on one of those little cross-beams.
Also they're terribly slippery when they're wet. Which on this particular trip was all the time.
The last few kilometers of our trip was alongside a stream, which now and then turned into pretty rapids.
And that was the end of our two-day mini-hike! The stream led to a teeny-tiny little town so we were back amongst civilization again. Our original plan was to sleep a second night in our tent and walk a little bit the next day too, but bwaaap-waaap, we ran out of drinking water. The stream originated in the wetland system which meant it was all deliciously brown marsh water, so ehhhh about boiling a couple bottles of that to drink. The town supposedly had a tiny grocery store according to the town map, but bwaaap-waaap, turned out it was nothing but a husk of a building with a "for sale" sign outside. So. We sat down on the old mossy stone steps in front of the former grocery store, called for a taxi and went home to sleep instead. Away from the rain and the mosquitoes. The end!
Remember to check back in next week for the first page of the chapter! (I haven't decided exactly which day yet, don't want to post it the exact same day as the books arrive. :P) I hope you all have had fun summer vacations too!