I’m taking a break from this towel for now. The darning has been meditative and soothing but the holes are all mended now and it’s time to switch to some other project. It’ll be interesting to see what it feels like in use. The darns are stiffer than the rest of it, naturally, but I’m hoping they will soften with washing and using.

Eric and the kids are away visiting his father. I’m all peopled out after our trip to Estonia so I stayed at home to rest up.

Nysse has been unusually cuddly today, spent hours sleeping on me, to the point where I had to move him for meals and toilet breaks. Maybe he missed me.

A rain shower just passed. There is a rainbow in the east, with golden evening light falling on the trees.

Back home. I could be unpacking and maybe should be unpacking but I’m really not feeling like it. Three hours driving yesterday, a night of bad sleep on the ferry, waking up at 5 o’clock because they had some weird onboard mobile network that hijacked my phone and kept it on Finnish time even when we had reached Swedish waters, and then two and a half more hours of driving. There are people out there who enjoy driving and under certain conditions I might also do so but this was just exhausting.

Today we head back home to Sweden, but we squeezed in another half-day in the countryside with my father and his wife.

Last year’s canoe trip on Ahja river was a hit so we did it again, but slightly differently. One canoe rental place has invented/introduced canoe rafts – three canoes attached to each other, with a wooden platform on top. It handles like a raft, sturdy, no wobbles. A bit less nimble but still decently steerable.

The big bonuses are that it’s much more social than a bunch of individual canoes – and it is very child- and dog-friendly.

There was eleven of us, and we ended up with one raft of adults and one of kids, with one dog each.

The dogs had to be split up and weren’t entirely happy about it. But two large, playful dogs on a raft getting the zoomies or starting to tussle with each other would have been too chaotic. They longed for each other, though, or perhaps they just wanted their herd to be all in one place.

We were on the same lake and river as last year, but only did half the distance, and in the other direction (upriver). Not that it felt like the direction made much of a difference – mostly we paddled along a lake with no noticeable flow.

At around the halfway point we steered our rafts into a little bay, tied them to each other, and had a lovely picnic. The rafts made it very easy. Dogs and paddles and kids and food everywhere.

The lake turned into a river for the last kilometre or so, and the paddling was more challenging now, with logs, submerged broken branches, sand banks and other obstacles.

I got fewer photos this year since the rafts didn’t exactly allow any darting around to the side to get new angles on things. And with four of us paddling, I couldn’t just stop my part whenever I felt like it, or we’d end up going in circles. Ingrid helped out and took over the camera for a while, too.

Ingrid’s most favourite burger ever, that she’s been looking forward to for a year. The sweet potato burger at Veg Machine at Aparaaditehas.

Travelling is all fun and good but after about a week I start missing the amenities of my own home. Eric I can call and talk to, but not the house. I miss our kitchen; I miss our sofa; I miss our bathroom; I miss not having my stuff in piles and bags. And Nysse.

The kids and I spent the day in the countryside with my father and his wife. Walked and talked and made sushi.

My father is struggling with a bad back so he couldn’t join us for any of the activities any longer, so here’s us walking with my brother instead. I swear I definitely didn’t line them up this time, it just happened!

This year there’s peas growing in several of the fields closest to their house, which makes for good snacking.

A crumbling wall mended with Legos, found in Tartu.