The floor guy has done his thing and left, and finally the building works here are done.

In the living room we opted for soap treatment only, like we have in the other rooms downstairs. I love the smell and feel of soap treated pine floors! The floor is getting its initial treatment here, with Adrian wetting the boards and Eric scrubbing in the soap. (I did the mopping up afterwards, when I wasn’t taking photos.)

The kitchen floor is going to get so many spills of all kinds that it needs more protection, so we went for a the most matte varnish available. The end result looks and feels much more pleasant than I had expected: very matte, quite different from all other varnished floors I have seen before. If varnished floors can be this discreet, maybe it wouldn’t have been too bad to varnish the floors in the other rooms as well? It will be really interesting to see how this ages.

Today was activity day. All days at camp are activity days, but this one has extra many, extra great activities. There was everything from a homemade scout-built carousel, and a homemade catapult, to a spa and a face painting station. I saw Adrian trying out the catapult with water balloons. Meanwhile Ingrid painted.

Tonight the scouts also got dessert their evening meal. Hotan totan is a traditional scout dessert – oatmeal fried with lots of butter and sugar and some cinnamon. When cooked for 200+ scouts, the pans we use are the size of wagon wheels and butter is added in chunks of half a kilogram each.

We are at scout camp. This first day ended with an inaugural camp fire with traditional (and non-traditional) scout songs.

This year’s camp is on Husarö island in the Stockholm archipelago. Instead of being stuck on a bus for four hours, we got a lovely cruise through the archipelago.

We’re on a permanent campground this time, and it comes with all kinds of nice conveniences, such as fireplaces, loos, some permanent tents, a root cellar and this little kitchen hut. (That white egg-shaped thing in the entrance into the root cellar.)

Adrian making pancakes for dinner.

The pool is a continued success. Endless amounts of splashing, making waves, and falling off things.

We awoke, very reluctantly, just after six in the morning because of some nutters who thought this was the best time to go out on the lake in a fishing boat. Car engine noise, repeated trips carrying equipment from car to boat, then plenty of rattling with chains and padlocks… it went on for long enough that there was no chance of staying asleep. When we met the nutters afterwards, they said they were from some environmental agency, inspecting the state of the fish population and thereby also the water quality. Great, I’m all for that, but I do not understand why they couldn’t take up their nets a few hours later.

Since we were up anyway, we might as well have breakfast. There were plenty of bilberry bushes everywhere around us, but the berries were few and small. It took quite a while to gather some to have with our porridge.


Afterwards we packed up our stuff and started the walk back. This trail was rougher than most marked hiking trails, with lots of fallen trees to get past. Sometimes over, sometimes under. And some, of course, just at that in-between height where it’s hard to fit under them, especially with a backpack, and hard to get over as well.


Just after halfway we passed a fireplace with nice views of another lake. Walking past this spot yesterday, the kids named this one “the fake lake” because at first glance it looked like it could be our tenting spot, but wasn’t. Since it looked so lovely yesterday, we planned a mid-morning stop here today, with a campfire and bread on a stick.


And whittling. Bread on a stick requires a good, smooth, clean stick, so Ingrid prepared one. Then the fire needed some time to burn, and what better way to pass the time than do some more whittling. When the breads had been eaten, the whittling continued. Adrian has no knife of his own yet so he borrowed mine, which left me with nothing much to do, other than taking photos. Both Ingrid and Adrian could probably have stayed there for much longer, but I got bored of waiting after some time, so we continued walking towards Brakmaren and the car.

This year’s scout camp is nearly here so we’ll get plenty of camping and outdoors activities soon. But Adrian still wanted to go camping with just us as well, and Ingrid came as well.

We’ve tented in Tyresta before, and Paradiset. Those two are my favourite nature reserves near Stockholm, beautiful and varied and easy to reach. This time I thought we’d try a new spot, so we aimed for a tenting spot next to lake Stensjön.

Somehow the preparations took me most of the day, even though I started just after breakfast. Getting all the gear, packing my own stuff, helping Adrian pack, shopping food, prepping food… by the time we were at the parking lot at Brakmaren, it was already six o’clock. We had a four-kilometre hike to the lake, and then there was a fire to build and light, and dinner to cook. (For dinner we had our traditional “hajkbomb” and then a delicious dessert of sauteed apples with chopped nuts and chocolate and cinnamon.)

Adrian went to sleep in the tent, while Ingrid and I went for a late night swim. There was a small island quite close to the shore – too far for the children to swim to on their own, but close enough for me and Ingrid. The weather was quite chilly so we didn’t stay on the island for more than just a moment. During our swim back, we had company of a bat that swooped by very close to us, just above the water.

When we got back, we found Adrian still awake, because the tent wasn’t like home, so we also went to bed to keep him company. Just as Ingrid went for a last pee in the dark, some animal rustled in the bushes right next to her. I joked about bears and elephants, but I wonder what it really was. Fox? (Those don’t make much noise, though, I believe…) Badger?

We have an inflatable pool that we bring out every summer, and both Ingrid and Adrian love it. On warm days, they are in and out the pool many, many times a day.

They love the pool as it is, but they also argued that a larger pool would be even better. Eric and I weren’t very convinced. But we agreed to pay half the cost of a larger one, if they saved up money for the other half. And they did. We got the new pool just before we left for Estonia. Eric unpacked it and set it up while we were gone, and now it’s up.

It’s huge. Over four metres in diameter, and over a metre deep – the water comes up to the top of Adrian’s chest. In fact we probably couldn’t have bought or used it last year, because it would have been too deep for him.

The only problem now is that the water is freezing cold! The temperature outside is around 12°C so the water isn’t much better.

Nevertheless Ingrid and Adrian wanted to try it out today. They didn’t stay in the water for long.

And just like that, our time in Estonia is over and it’s time to go home.

Ingrid and Adrian are both telling me that they wish we could stay longer, and so do our friends here. As for me, I’m quite happy to go home now. I’m looking forward to being with Eric again. I’m looking forward to being in my own home, rather than living in a suitcase. A proper kitchen, and a bedroom with blackout blinds, and a room of my own where I can be on my own. Being with friends is fun, but constantly being with other people is also quite exhausting.

During summer, the Tallinn-Stockholm ferry usually has some kind of entertainment for kids. Their conference centre gets no use this time of the year so they fill it with other activities. This year they have a bunch of “big wooden games”. There were games I’d seen before, and games that were totally new to me. There were all kinds: games of skill, of memory, of speed, of logic, and so on. We had a lot of fun here.

Sangaste castle has a newly opened exhibition about the last count of Sangaste, early in the last century, and the technologies of his era. Both things that have survived to this day such as the wireless radio and the telephone, but also more odd ones such as massage machines and grain sorting machines.

Alongside with the tech of those days there was a gallery of pictures of what the people of those days imagined future tech to be like. Some of it has come true, even though it doesn’t exactly look the way they imagined it back then: hearing the day’s news in your home instead of buying newspapers; robots cleaning the floor; machines imparting information to schoolchildren. Mail delivered by flying postmen might become reality one day. Underwater races seem unlikely.