Scouts, building their camp.

Meanwhile the kitchen crew prepared food for 189 people, in relatively primitive conditions.

I have never before cooked on this scale; it was an interesting experience. When tikka masala spice mix is measured not in teaspoons but in cups, and one person can spend almost half an hour just peeling onions, and the end result is served in pots so large that it takes two people to carry them to the serving table.

Inauguration ceremony at Spånga scouts’ summer camp, by the shores of lake Trekanten in beautiful Tiveden.

Ingrid is leaving for scout camp tomorrow, and I’ll be joining this year as part of the kitchen crew. The theme for this camp is sort of fairy tale/medieval (forest spirits and trolls and such) and everybody is encouraged to bring medieval clothes, so I decided to make Ingrid a medieval-inspired cloak.

A 59 kr fleece blanket from IKEA and some silver ribbon and about an hour of work later, here’s the result, proudly modelled by Adrian. He loves the cloak and now wants one, too.

Adrian got a new scooter today. He’s been borrowing Ingrid’s, but of course that only works when Ingrid isn’t using it. So now he has his own.

At the playground in Kadriorg park, waiting for time to pass.

Today we take the ferry back to Stockholm. The drive from Tartu (where we stay) to Tallinn (which has all the connections to the rest of the world) is over 2 hours, plus city traffic in Tallinn, plus a lunch break of uncertain length, so I aim to arrive an hour before we really want to be at the ferry terminal.

Kadriorg is a large beautiful park very near the harbour and it’s become a tradition to kill that extra hour there. (Well, except for one year when we got stuck in a traffic jam due to a bike race in Tallinn and used up the hour, which is why we have it.)

We went for a walk in another bog, with my father and his wife (on the Riisa hiking trail in Soomaa bog).

The path passed right by several small pools with platforms that made it easy to climb into and out of the water, so we tried out the water.

Bog pool water is brown like Coca-Cola.

Given how small the pools were I had expected them to be warm from the sun, but the water was quite shockingly cold. Only a very thin layer at the top was warm. If I swam very carefully, almost gliding without moving my arms, I could keep in the warm layer. But then I turned back and swam through water that I had churned up with my legs, and it was cold again.

No trip to Estonia is complete without a visit to one of the adventure parks with their treetop obstacle courses. This year Adrian joined us, and had more fun and got further than I had really dared to hope for. Ingrid on the other hand was super disappointed that she didn’t make the length limit for half of the tracks.

We’re on the 12th floor with a fabulous view of half the city, including the river. Too bad the windows face east (and it’s summer so sunrise is way too early).

Living on the 12th floor is different from living at ground level: we are level with the birds. We often see huge flocks of birds flying past the building: sometimes thrushes I believe, sometimes jackdaws.

We’re taking a day off from activities and stuff and just walking around in Tartu. We kind of happened to run across a few geocaches, though.