We visited my father and his wife, and made sushi together. I was mostly too busy talking to take any photos, so most of these are not mine. Ingrid photographed some of the sushi materials; Adrian photographed me from various angles.

The book I’m enjoying is Estonia’s most famous and well-known cookbook – the wonderful Raamat maitsvast ja tervislikust toidust (“The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food”) from 1955 which contains everything from very traditional Estonian recipes, to lots of Russian baked goods, to instructions for using all sorts of fish that I’ve never even heard of. It was strange and exotic already in the 1980s.

The annual trip to Estonia isn’t complete without an outing to Otepää adventure park. 11 years after our first visit (when I was pregnant with Adrian and not allowed to do any of the fun stuff so Ingrid was the only climber) and it’s still fun.

Both kids are now tall and agile enough to manage all the ordinary tracks. There used to be special track labelled the “path of suffering” but I saw it has been removed. I guess not enough people cared for all the suffering. None of us three had ever tried it; the initial rope climb straight up was more than enough to deter us.

The highlight of the last, fifth track is the rather spectacular “Tarzan leap”, where you hold on to a thick rope and swing from a platform about 10 metres above ground, to catch yourself in a net 20 metres away. (With a safety harness of course.) Scary but exhilarating.



After the climbing tracks you’re treated to two zipline rides back and forth across a wide meadowed valley.

We went canoeing on Ahja river with our Estonian friends.

Vesipapp arranged the tour for us and were very helpful. We met them at Kiidjärve, where we got our canoes and oars and life jackets – and instructions.

Also plastic jugs for scooping out water from the canoes, but my boat mate and I soon had our division of labour down so well (left side of the boat for her, right side for me, and swapping halfway through the trip) that there was very rarely a need to switch oars from one side to the other. Our canoe barely got a tiny trickle of water at the bottom – nothing you could scoop up. But the teams with more… ehum… athletic paddling styles got rather wetter.

We started at Kiidjärve and had a bit of lazy paddling down the river to begin with. Then a long dammed lake, which was easier to navigate but required more paddling. At the end of the lake at Taevaskoja a representative from Vesipapp helped us carry the canoes over the dam and get them in the river again. From there on it was easy but exciting going: a gentle river, but with constant bends, underwater rocks, logs both under and over the water, low-hanging trees, etc. And beautiful views!

Note to future me: the 12 km trip from Kiidjärve to Porgandi, which was supposed to take 3 hours, took us 4, even though we only had a short break in the middle at the dam. The shorter, 9 km route to Otteni would probably have been enough.

Credit goes to Ingrid for the photos with me in them. It took some manoeuvring to hand over the camera from one canoe to another without risking dropping it!

We used to travel with colouring books and crates of Lego for the kids. Now it’s my hobbies that take up space in the car.

I brought my cardigan project with me. I did consider leaving it at home and just doing socks for 10 days, because they are much more portable. But the socks are mostly time-fillers, whereas I want to actually finish this cardigan.

I’ve found nothing that beats a good-quality wicker basket for storing knitting projects. It protects the knitting and doesn’t get damaged by knitting needles or scissors. Unlike a bag, everything is clearly visible and there are no nooks and corners that eat up small things like markers or pieces of scrap yarn.

Apparently Rally Estonia, part of the World Rally Championship, is happening in Tartu right now, and Ingrid wanted to see it. Adrian and I weren’t interested, so we went dog walking with a friend instead. Although we did watch some of the rally on TV, and it wasn’t entirely boring, but the half hour we saw was enough for me.

On the ferry to Tallinn. After two missed summers due to covid, we’re on our way to Estonia again! Eric stays at home for some peace and quiet, and to take care of Nysse.

Nysse came home without the tracker yesterday. 70% battery left, no rush, I’ll go find it up tomorrow morning, I thought.

This morning, though, the tracker was offline. Not out of battery, but just not sending and not responding. I had a few location records from yesterday, so I knew roughly where it should be, and I know the kind of shrubberies that Nysse tends to lose it in, so I hoped to find it even without being able to send it the “find me” signal that makes it beep.

I think this is the 6th time in total that I go looking for the tracker. Sometimes Nysse has lost it in a hedge next to the street so I can just reach in and pick it up. Other times it’s been in someone’s yard. In those cases I ring the doorbell and introduce myself and ask for permission, but if nobody is home and the tracker isn’t too far in, I just go there anyway. I tend to take Adrian with me when I do this – I feel better about walking into a neighbour’s yard when I have a kid with me. I imagine it makes me look less like a creepy weirdo.

Today I found the tracker a few metres into a yard, totally destroyed. The collar was torn in pieces, and the tracker itself was full of small, sharp bite marks. No wonder it went offline!

I wonder what kind of creature it was that found and destroyed it. Not Nysse, because he was at home at 5:25 when the tracker died – and also he has never shown any kind of aggression towards it. Was it another cat, angry with an interloper in its territory? A rat?

The tracker did a good job during its short life, but I probably won’t be buying a new one. We have a much better idea now of how far (or rather, how not far) Nysse normally ranges, and know to not lead him astray any more when we go out. And I hope and believe that Nysse has learned the neighbourhood well enough now to not get lost on his own.

Family fun: demolishing Adrian’s Lego constructions together, and sorting the pieces by colour to prepare for the next time. The Millennium Falcon is so monochrome that our sorting bins are “small light gray”, “large light gray”, “small dark gray”, “large dark gray”, “black” and “other”.

After two years of no travelling, all of a sudden thousands and thousands of Swedes are trying to renew their passports all at the same time. This surge came as a complete surprise to the Swedish police, so the queues have been ridiculous.

I checked our passports in March for our travels this summer – four months in advance of the first trip, which I thought was plenty of time. Eric’s and Adrian’s needed renewing. The first available time for a renewal appointment was in May. In Östersund, 6 hours away from Stockholm by train. No chance of getting an appointment anywhere closer in reasonable time. People were literally writing bots to monitor the booking site for cancellations. Since the production time was supposed to be 5 to 6 weeks, that appointment in May was annoying but OK, so we went with that.

Then in early summer one of the two passport production machines in Finland broke down. Of course our passports didn’t get finished in the promised 5 to 6 weeks. Now we have less than one week to go before our trip to Estonia, and no passports.

Luckily temporary passports are a thing. They’re expensive, valid for a single trip, cannot be issued more than 72 hours in advance, and involve yet more queueing. So that’s what we spent this evening doing – arranging a temporary passport for Adrian at Arlanda airport. I’d been reading horror stories about the experience – people literally queueing overnight, or fainting in the queue due to the heat – so I was prepared for anything. Even not getting a passport at all and having to cancel the trip. But we had luck with the timing, and the queueing system has been greatly improved here, so we were in and out in half an hour, with a shiny pink passport in hand. It remains to be seen whether the real passports arrive in time for our next trip, or if we get to spend another evening queueing here.

I assumed that most of the police station would be off limits for photography but that an anonymous-looking institutional staircase would be OK.