Occasionally I suffer from restless legs in the evening when I’m trying to fall asleep. I’ve noticed that this is most likely to happen if I follow vigorous exercise by around three days of unusually idle life. Case in point: today.
Thursday was a public holiday so I missed my gym workout; Friday was a so-called “squeeze day” so I didn’t cycle to work; today we drove to Sala to visit the silver mine so I’ve mostly been sitting or walking today. Already on the way back from Sala, when I was about to nod off in the car, I was woken from my nodding by a creeping, itching, restless feeling in my legs. The evening was bound to be worse.
So while the family was at home having dinner, I went out and cycled. From home to Drottningholm, then a little circuit on Lovö, back to Drottningholm where I walked around and photographed for a while, and then home. Those 30 km got all the twitches out of my legs.
As a bonus I got to see a very cute swan family in one of the ponds at Drottningholm. The cygnets can’t have been more than a few days old – all downy and wobbly and weak. Soon after I got close to the pond, the family were about to get out of water. The parents got out onto the bank easily; the babies were almost falling over trying to get up the little slope, flapping their almost non-existent wing stubs. When they got, mum and dad were preening and cleaning their feathers, while some of the babies seemed to fall asleep from the effort of climbing those few steps.