Our race season ended yesterday with a half-marathon race on the bicycle path ‘La Docle Via’, from Saint-Saveur-du-Montagut to La-Voulte-sur-Rhône in Ardèche. La Dolce Via, built on a former railroad bed, follows the river Eyrieux, and it is probably the most scenic route we have been on, this time on […]
We had five travel days left on our Interrail passes from the Summer Rails trip to Finland, and thought it would be a good idea to use them to visit the Black Forest (Schwartzwald) in South-western Germany for some relaxed hiking. And so we did. The Fall foliage was not […]
This post is about the food we enjoyed on our trip, either home made, store bought, or ordered at a restaurant. It was not immediately clear to me what is the best way to organize this post, by themes or chronologically, so I chose the latter. Below are the salad […]
Then it was almost the time to say goodbye to Finland. We booked the couple of last nights in a highrise in Kalasatama (only the 11th floor though) on the Eastern side of Helsinki, since we have spent a lot of time in the Southern and Western parts, and we […]
Besides the concert in Tampere, this was the part of our vacation that I looked forward to the most: almost two weeks at Tomi’s parents’ house in Kangaslampi in North Savonia region in Eastern Finland. As usual, we had the house to ourselves since the parents live in an apartment […]
From Tampere we took the Serlachius shuttle to Mänttä to visit the Art Festival, the largest summer exhibition of Finnish contemporary art — our almost annual tradition since I don’t remember when, but it must have been before we moved to Singapore in 2008. This year’s theme was “On Being”, […]
Besides the flights between Bergamo and Helsinki the only thing we had fixed before this vacation were the tickets to Eppu Normaali’s farewell concert at the Ratina Stadium in Tampere. Originally they had two big stadium concerts planned, one in Helsinki and one in Tampere, but for nostalgic reasons we […]
There is not much to write about our short stay in Helsinki. Since our flight from Bergamo landed after midnight, we stayed the first night at the Scandic Helsinki Airport hotel. The next two nights we stayed at an Airbnb in Sompasaari. On our first morning there we went for […]
We had just one whole day in Bergamo, since our outbound flight was in the evening of the second day. We took the funicular up to Città Alta, the medieval town surrounded by the 16th-century Venetian Walls. We walked through the old town and returned to the city center on […]