Socks wear out, and that seems normal and obvious. Dishcloths and linen kitchen towels also get rubbed a lot, until they get holes.

Sofas and carpets and rugs generally don’t. Sofas are all artificial fibres these days, so they’re almost eternal. Wool rugs somehow also seem nearly impervious to wear; I wonder how that works.

But this cotton rag rug is apparently not eternal. Ten (?) years of footsteps have worn the fringes down to nubs. The body of the carpet is perhaps a bit flatter and slightly thinner than it used to be, but not visibly worn. I wonder how many years it will last.

I really have no energy or desire to do anything that I don’t have to, apart from reading. Everything feels like a chore, and actual chores I avoid even thinking about.

So I take baby steps to get things done. I want to plant more flowering currants. It took me weeks to gather the energy to find a place that sells them, and order a few. Then it took me two days before I picked up the parcel, and that was enough for that day. Today I unpacked them. And that was enough for today. Now they’re watered and in half-shade so they should stay alive until I get to the point of actually getting them in the ground.

Four days ago when we left home, the garden was green but the bushes were still half-bare.

When we came back, it was like there had been an explosion of flowers in the garden. Suddenly EVERYTHING was flowering at the same time. Bushes in the hedge, flowering quinces, ground cover plants, primroses and daffodils, cherry trees…

This profusion of colour everywhere is hard to capture in a photo.

I loved the evenings and mornings here. We had company from other walkers the first two nights, but last night it was just us. The evenings have been full of birdsong. They only stop around 21:30 and get going around 2:30 again. Thank god for earplugs.

I’m no expert on songbirds but I’m guessing blackbirds were responsible for much of the singing. I often see and hear blackbirds at home, and these sounded the same. We also heard cuckoos, which are such a nostalgic summer sound for me. We don’t get those at home.

The first night a pair of cranes flew past several times, honking so loudly that they woke Adrian. Or maybe multiple pairs who just happened to choose the same route.

There was another bird with a very distinct sound that I wasn’t familiar with. I had to Google for its sound to find out that it was a woodcock (morkulla, metskurvits). It came back every night and kept flying back and forth over the camping site, singing its odd song all the while. Crawk, crawk, crawk, tweet!

A combo of Oxögabergsrundan and Trollkyrkorundan, maybe 10 km or so, and Mellannäsrundan, 1.5 km.

We did the most obvious route yesterday. Today we headed into the wilder parts of the park. Yesterday we met plenty of people all day; today – especially on Oxögabergsrundan – barely any at all.

The elevation profiles for today’s trails were much more up-and-down than for the lake circuit yesterday. But in practice we found today’s walk less challenging. There may have been more hills, but the path itself was somewhat more even and easier to walk, with fewer roots to stumble over.

The weather report promised rain for today. A few days ago it promised pouring rain all day. Then the forecast gradually improved as the day got closer, and by this morning we were down to maybe the occasional shower. And in practice we got a few very, very light showers. Enough to put the rain covers on the rucksacks as a precaution, but not enough to get us really wet.

We managed to time both our mid-morning snack and our lunch break between the rain showers. Adrian of course found rocks to climb on top of for his snacks.

I love walking in really wild forests like this, with wild growth everywhere and dead trees left to rot where they fall. When a large tree falls right across the trail, the park staff cut out a big enough chunk of the trunk to allow hikers to pass through, but leave the rest untouched. And they don’t even bother doing anything about trees that you can easily step over or crawl under.

I walked the Trollkyrkorundan trail when I was here on my own a few years ago. It’s funny how my brain remembers places. I remembered the viewpoints on top of the rocky hills, the two “troll churches”. Most of the trail I didn’t recognize at all. But there were small things here and there that were immediately familiar. I knew I had walked past this particular cluster of rocks, these specific dead trees. I remembered stepping on these very roots to climb that rock with an absolute certainty.

After 10 km of walking it was barely three o’clock in the afternoon. No point in heading back to the camp yet, because all we’d do there is sit around and wait for dinnertime. Even Adrian thought more walking would be better. So we drove a few kilometres to the other end of the small park for another short circular walk. This one was so flat and easy that it felt like a bimble in the park.

Adrian loves walking and can easily keep going all day, as long as his pack is light. If it isn’t, he starts complaining. The kilometres don’t bother him, but the kilograms do.

I’m vaguely thinking of doing a longer walking holiday this summer, covid permitting. If we did day hikes, we could make them quite ambitious. But if it’s anything that requires us to carry all our stuff with us, then either Eric and I would have to carry most of his gear, or we’d have to keep the days quite short, or live with a fair bit of complaining. So maybe we need to stick to day hikes still.

Trehörningsrundan 9.5 km + Tärnekullerundan 1.3 km.

A full day of walking. We hiked around lake Trehörningen (“the triangle”) and added an extra detour to see some caves.

It’s a popular route so we met people, passed people and were passed by others, all day long. I was afraid it would be crowded even, but it never got to the point where it felt that way.

It’s customary for hikers on a trail to greet each other. It’s just a natural, nice thing to do. It’s a behaviour one just picks up after a few hikes. In a touristy place like this, though, not everybody you meet is a hiker. Some are just “normal people” out in the woods for a day. You can see by people’s clothing whether they will look at you and say hi or not. If they’re wearing jeans or tracksuit bottoms and trainers and a city backpack, they’re likely to just look past you and pretend they didn’t see you, like one does with strangers one passes in a city street. But if they wear outdoor trousers and hiking boots, you’ll probably get a smile and a greeting.

The trail circles a lake, keeping quite close to the shore at all times, so you’d think it would be flat. And in terms of metres of altitude it may have been. But the terrain was uneven, with rocks and roots everywhere, so it was quite tiring.

Adrian is constitutionally incapable of walking at a slow pace. He scampers, and he runs, and he climbs all the large rocks he can see. Most of the time he was ahead of us and then waited for us to catch up at our energy-efficient adult pace. As a result he was tired after we’d walked barely a third of the way. So we took a long break, ate lots of nuts and dried fruit, and rested his legs.

The weather was unsettled and threatening rain much of the time, but in the end we only got a few drops. On the other hand we got plenty of dramatic light.

The so-called caves at Vitsand were disappointing. Despite the name, there’s nothing cavelike about them. It’s just a bunch of really, really large rocks in a higgledy-piggledy pile that you can scramble through and under.

We’re taking a four-day weekend and spending it camping/hiking in Tiveden. This is going to be a really leisurely weekend so all we did today was pack, drive here, set up camp and then just lounge around all evening. Cook dinner on the Trangia stove, sit in the evening sun and read, listen to the birds sing.

There’s a good chance that the national park will be chock full of people tomorrow – it’s a long weekend in May after all – but at least this place isn’t crowded. We’re camping at the Tivedstorp STF hostel. They have a camping ground, and then they have “the other camping ground” which is at the very far end of everything and if I sit facing the right way then it really feels like we’re on our own out here. But with the benefit of a road, and an outhouse, and running water within a few hundred metres’ walk.

It’s just me and Eric and Adrian. Adrian loves camping and hiking. Ingrid sort of does, but not with us. Not any more. So she gets to stay at home on her own for an entire weekend for the first time.

The ground is still slightly wet with dew at 9 in the morning, but the deck is dry enough for me to put down a bean bag and have my morning meeting outside.

An actual, real concrete truck turned up today, for pouring the upper retaining wall. I’d expected the guys to be stirring concrete in buckets or something. It’s not like this wall requires a truckload of concrete. But I guess a sufficient number of small retaining walls all taken together will add up to a truckload of concrete, and with some planning and coordination it works out.

Two years ago we had to replace the incoming water pipe. The trench for the pipe went through both the retaining walls on that side of the garden, leaving ugly gaps in them.

Apparently (or so the builders told us) it’s not a good idea to build a wall on top of soil that has been newly dug up to such a depth, because the soil needs time to settle and compact properly. In these climes you ideally want to wait out at least one solid freeze-and-thaw cycle, to ensure that you don’t end up with a wall that gets deformed by shifting soil.

Last year there was no proper winter. So then we waited another year. For two years now we’ve had to live with broken retaining walls in that part of the garden. Luckily this winter we had some actual winter. And if this had been another crappy winter we would have gone ahead anyway. I am so fed up with looking at a broken wall.

Today the builders finally came to start working on the walls. This will be so great! I can start planting things above the upper wall, next to the house! And I can replace the ground cover plants around the hedge, because I know the ground won’t be dug up yet again. Hopefully.