The dreaded November is over. My memory may fail me but I think that it wasn’t as bad as it has been in previous years we’ve lived here. Of course we had a considerable number of days with low hanging clouds but also fair amount of sunshine, and many beautiful, […]
In November we have had two back-to-back long weekends, All Saints Day a week ago and the Armistice this past weekend. We spent the former in Lyon, and this time escaped to the Vercors mountains, maybe the first time since we moved to the opposite direction from Grenoble. The plan […]
Usually in Helsinki we stay in quiet, old neighborhoods as close to the city center as possible. That’s what we did this time for our first stay, but for the final stay we booked an Airbnb apartment in Vuosaari, the Eastern terminus of the metro line. Early in our vacation […]
We only spent one night at Tomi’s family’s summer house. In hindsight, after learning that the internet worked there just fine, we should have spent more time there. On the other hand, spending all those rainy and thundestormy days on the small island would have been a lousy idea, since […]
We spent the second week at Tomi’s parents’ house in Kangaslampi in Eastern Finland. Kangaslampi is another Finnish commune on the brink of extinction — the school was closed this summer. Its only hope is to cater to Summer tourism and visitors who have their Summer houses in the area. […]
In this summer’s vacation we spent three weeks in our native country. We spent the middle week working, and for the first and the last week we planned visits to lesser known (at least to us) nature destinations both in Helsinki and in the Savonia region of Finland. We also […]
This was the first time this summer that we had good weather for the whole weekend. At least it has felt like we’ve got nothing but rain this spring and the early summer. The downside of the arrival of sunshine is that it also brings hot daytime temperatures (the nights […]
The Tour of Sarrasine and The Dentelles of Montmirail This post wraps up our short vacation in Southern France, mostly Gard and Vaucluse departments. This hike traveled in Gigondas, that is a French wine Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) in Southern Rhône wine region, producing mainly red wine and little rosé. […]
Pont du Gard This was the last brutally windy day of our vacation. On the other hand the wind was blessing since the afternoon became really hot (it was +29°C when we returned to the car). Our destination of the day was Pont du Gard, an ancient Roman aqueduct bridge […]