We were gone in Italy during the Midsummer weekend, so we made up for it with a belated fake Midsummer brunch today.

All the traditions were present. Devilled eggs, pickled herring of various kinds, new potatoes, mini quiches, and a strawberry cake.

The cake may look ugly and sloppy and shapeless, but it is utterly delicious. Strawberries and an elderflower curd – sweet and tart and juicy. Recipe here; Dagens Nyheter is the source.

Ordered four new cushions for our deck furniture. Three looked normal – and the fourth was missing the dots. Which probably won’t affect functionality for a long time, but it looks weird enough that I’ll be sending it back, which is a hassle.

The camera is going on a trip to Portugal for repairs. Actually the main problem is not so much the camera (although it does need repairs) but my everyday zoom lens.

The camera’s problems is that the rear LCD screen only works if I fold it out partway. It’s been that way for long enough that it’s ingrained in my muscle memory now to fold out the screen before even turning on the camera. Not a big problem, most of the time.

Now you see it…

… now you don’t.

The lens on the other hand just plain doesn’t work. When I turn on the camera, the lens motors in and out a few times and then stops, but the picture is black. It looks like it’s not connecting to the camera.

If I’m sending in one for repairs then I might as well send both.

Olympus have made it very easy. Fill in an online form, pay the flat fee, send it off. No guessing, no estimates, no “send it in and we’ll get back to you with a price”. And if they can’t fix it, you get the money back. It’s not cheap, but neither is a new camera.

There hasn’t been much rain recently so the little plum trees need watering. The clay soil gets so compact that it won’t absorb water well at all. I’ve settled on giving each tree one watering can’s worth of water, but I have to portion it out slowly, or it will just run off without reaching the tree. So I water one tree until the water puddles around the tree, then walk around the house to do the same to the other tree on the other side, and back and forth like that until they’re both properly soaked.

Some kind of force had torn down the anti-gnaw protection around the tree, so now I tied them in place with string.

29 °C outside, 29 °C inside. I am not enjoying this.

Ten o’clock at night, and it’s still light enough that I could read outside if I wanted to.

Back to everyday life, and work. Two weeks to go before I take a longer vacation. The week in Italy was by necessity as early as possible in the summer, and the timing of our Estonia trip was also determined by external factors, and the gap between them too long for me to take the whole time off.

There’s a bit of a heat wave going on; the weather here is as hot as what we had in Italy. We went out for lunch to the (temporary?) food-court-slash-park on the quay in Marievik.

Got woken up at 7:30 this morning by some kind of repetitive yowling. I’m guessing it was the house cat who was feeling amorous.

In the morning, a drive from Riva del Garda to Milan through torrents of rain. Literally rivers of rain pouring out from parking lots, through gaps in garden walls, etc.

Ran across the remains of a traffic incident, and people chasing a deer kid in the road, which was probably related.

The Milan airport is Armani-branded.

There’s a lake, and it has boats, so we went for a boat tour. Like in Venice, we opted for an ordinary scheduled passenger boat going from town to town, rather than a sightseeing tour.

The boat took us to the small town of Limone, a little ways down the coast of Lake Garda. As the boat approached town, we were curious about the odd large stone structure that dominated the view. From the Internet I learned that these are old terraced lemon orchards. There are more of those, further up the hills. Some have been restored and turned into tourist sights.

The one closest to the harbour was all hidden behind walls and not open for visitors. There were a couple of small openings in the wall that allowed us to peek in, though.

We weren’t particularly interested in Limone itself – it was just an excursion – so after a brief walk and an ice cream, we took the next boat back to Riva del Garda.

The lake was full of people on all kinds of small craft, mostly windsurfers and small Optimist dinghies. In places the lake looked like a boat soup. I’m guessing there was some kind of sailing camp or course going on, or more likely several of these.

We also saw a kind of board that was new to us – a wing foil. Like a windsurfing board, but instead of a vertical sail attached to the board, these had a large free hand-held wing, and a hydrofoil under the board. They zoomed past like rockets.

By the way, I’ve generally been quite happy with the photos my phone camera takes, while my big camera is out of action, as long as I stay away from the zoom. I guess it switches to a different lens when I zoom, and then the picture quality becomes horrible, like you see in these last three photos. I tried taking a few pictures of flowers while we were hiking in the mountains, but had to throw out every single one of them.

We’ll have nice views for our drive back to Milan tomorrow – that’s our road snaking along the side of the lake.

Back in Riva del Garda, we walked around. The city centre isn’t very large so we could cover almost all of it.

When we didn’t know which way to go, we aimed for leather goods shops. I bought my favourite handbag here in Riva del Garda many years ago (and replaced it with an identical one) so I was hoping I could find something similar again. Small backpack handbags are hard to find. We saw all kinds of lovely bags, but not the type I wanted.

There was apparently a road biking competition that finished here today. We’ve been seeing loads of cyclists, especially around Cortina d’Ampezzo, and posters for bicycle events.

During our boat trip, we spotted a cable car going up to some kind of edifice halfway up the hill. When we ran out of promenade streets, we went to check that thing out. It turned out to be a ruined old bastion, with nice views back down towards the town.

When it was time for dinner, everyone was in agreement – there was no way we’d find anything that would beat Officina Verde, where we ate yesterday. So we went back for more. Since everyone had sampled everything, we knew exactly what we liked best, so instead of the set menus we picked our favourites.

“Something something with hints of the sea:”

Burrata of fermented cashew nut, with a heart of basil and home-made tomato relish:

Lasagna, mille strati style:

Mango mousse sticks with a yuzu chocolate coating and mango sauce:

First a longish but scenic and eventful drive from Cortina d’Ampezzo to Riva del Garda.

Speaking of driving, this our car for the week, and the nerve-wracking driveway to the parking lot behind the house in San Vito di Cadore. We booked a smallish manual car. (Because we knew we’d be on twisty roads in the mountains, and we also wanted it to be not too difficult to park.) Instead we got this monstrosity – neither smallish nor manual. It was technically better than what we had booked – or at least more expensive – and Hertz didn’t have anything closer to our wishes available anyway, so this is what we had to deal with. This driveway had the car’s proximity sensors on both sides beeping at maximum level all the way, at least twice a day. Yay.

It wasn’t actually raining when we arrived in Riva del Garda but the weather forecast promised an imminent thunderstorm, so we stayed in for a few hours and watched a movie instead. That thunderstorm never arrived so I felt a bit cheated.

After the movie we walked towards the town to find dinner. We were again staying on the outskirts of the town, and the path to town went along some lovely little lanes, past smelly jasmine bushes and a waterfall.

We ate at an absolutely lovely vegan restaurant – Officina Verde. They had three set three-course menus, one Japanese-themed, one vaguely Mexican, and one with an Italian flavour. Since there was four of us, we tried all of them.

Every single course wowed all of us – we were constantly exclaiming about just how delicious everything was. And interesting and innovative, too. We could sometimes not even figure out what we were actually eating. How do they come up with these things? Vegan burrata made from fermented cashews, with a basil filling? Marinated tofu in a hazelnut crust, with a smoked pepper sauce? (Neither of which is the photo below – that’s just a vegan uramaki roll.)

A thunderstorm did arrive while we were about to have dessert, and was so violent that we had to move inside, even though we were under a canopy. The water was splashing everywhere, and the noise was making it hard to have a conversation. The sky was flashing constantly. But by the time we were ready to leave, the storm was over, and we could walk back without even opening our umbrellas.