Little chapter break blog update
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 booksshould arrive during the first half of next week so I'll put up another post then, but I don't know which day yet. (The person at the printers who was going to let me know the exact date went on Summer vacation before she did, eep! x3) So I'm just going to wait patiently for truck noises to appear while I sit here and start drawing the next chapter.
So hey, I went on a small two-day forest hike with my mom!
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. But now it was time to learn, 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. Anyway, pictures:
On top of learning some basics we had to make sure I'm able to carry my share of the equipments, which is about 10kg+ of stuff. (Spolier alert: it was fine.) Oh, and break in my first proper pair of hiking shoes! I've always just gone waling in my year-round whatever-shoes. The terrain was fortunately very forgiving for getting used to this stuff, the first half day was mostly softly rolling hills and relatively even planes.
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, day temperatures stayed between 13 and 18 degreed celcius, and even that felt a bit too hot now and then while walking. I've been actually pleased with the chilly weather this summer, temperatures above 20 are unpleasant. (I know this cool summer has basically been a death blow for a lot of struggling businesses in Finland though, especially with the recession already steamrolling everything, so that's sad of course.)
And between every ridge and hill is a tiny piece of wetland, usually with a little pond in the middle. Not a whole lot of cloudberries though, the few we saw were still way raw. The hill 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 so many of you were asking about? Those are the kind of planks that they were. They're called "pitkospuut" in Finnish ("pitkin" means "along" and "puu" means "tree, wood") and they're basically a simple type of boardwalk for crossing different types of wetlands, just wide enough for one person towalk on with one plank for each foot. 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 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 and walk a little bit the next day too, but bwaaap-waap~ we ran out of drinking water. The stream originated in the wetland system so it was all deliciously brown marsh water, so ehhhh about boiling a couple bottles of that to drink. Also the town supposedly had a tiny grocery store according to the town map, but bwaaap-waap~, turned out it was just 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 come back next week for the first page of the next chapter! I haven't decided exactly which day yet, I don't want to post it the exact same day as the books arrive. :P