The ferry trip with Tallink from Tallinn to Stockholm is made up of hours of boredom – cycling between various somewhat-uncomfortable places to sit and make time pass – and the buffet dinner.

For me the highlight is usually the array of pickled herring. The best one today was one flavoured with elderflower, dill and fennel.

Adrian loves the dessert buffet best. This time there was a chocolate fountain, in addition to all the cakes.

After dinner Ingrid and I spent some time simply roaming the corridors, for lack of a better pastime. The guests on deck 9 got arts posters in their corridors, with Miró and Kandinsky and other abstractionists.

The carpets in the corridors had an odd pattern that made everything look just slightly skewed. Almost giving me hints of seasickness without any waves at all.

I still say yes to strawberries when they’re in season. Also raspberries and blueberries, for those who prefer those.

Splurged on extra nice strawberries for today. The supermarkets here usually have a single kind, and it’s whatever they can buy in bulk. The veggie stand in Spånga Torg often has several varieties, sometimes named ones. Today they had “Malwina” strawberries. Intensely red all the way through, and super delicious!

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.

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.

Today we took the boat to the island of Murano, with its glassworks.

After some initial aimless wandering, we picked one of the workshops to visit. Wave was a wonderful place.

They do offer tours, but there was also the option of just hanging around in one corner of the workshop and watching the glassblowers at their work. This was far more interesting than a more formal tour would have been. It was fascinating to see how all the different steps of manipulating the blob of glass led to the final product. Several times we thought we knew what effect a step would have – and then they did something to twist it to something completely unexpected.

Another amazing workshop displayed seaweed glass sculptures by Davide Penso. If I was rich enough to have more rooms in my house than I knew what to do with, I wouldn’t mind having something like this in my home.

That’s not going to happen, but we did want to bring some small glass item home with us from Murano. There was a lot of choice, but at the same time many of the shops seemed to sell copies of the same kind of things, with less variety than I had expected. I guess people come here with specific expectations when it comes to design and style.

Aside from the glassworks, Murano seemed more residential and everyday than the main island of Venice.

Boats everywhere, still, of course, used like cars and vans would be in any other city – such as for parcel delivery.

After a lovely lunch at restaurant Alla Vecchia Pescheria (where the food was, of course, served on flatware of Murano glass) we headed towards the lighthouse and the waterbus stop there.

We took the waterbus to the island of San Michele for some shade and walking. The entire island is a cemetery and photography was prohibited, so I can only share a view of the entrance, and one of the waterbus quay.

The evening brought more walking, and a pretty mediocre dinner. In fact we haven’t been very impressed with the restaurants here. Lots of focus on meat, of course; difficult to find places with more than one or two vegetarian options. Salads, when offered, have oftentimes been no more than uninspired piles of ingredients – like a tuna salad consisting of a bed of lettuce, then a pile of tinned sweetcorn, and another of tinned tuna.

Great gelato, though! Gelatoteca Susa had a wide range of excellent ice cream, with both classical flavours and more modern ones – dark chocolate with lemon, or mango with grapefruit. I didn’t remember to take a photo, but luckily Ingrid did.

And then it was evening again.

We could certainly have entertained ourselves here for longer – museums, churches, other islands, etc – but two days did not feel too short.

Bonus photo by Ingrid:

Postdated. I knew I took more photos this day! And in the mess of my camera stopping working, I somehow misplaced them, but now (three weeks later) I found them again.

Airport car rental. Waiting. No matter how short the queue, it always takes half an hour at least to get through the process.

Our giant Jeep Compass. On the one hand – giant. On the other hand – spacious and modern. I could connect my Android phone to the car’s infotainment system and get Google Maps up on a big screen, and get Spotify to play without fiddling around with a separate Bluetooth speaker.

The main sight in Verona was the Roman-era Arena. I wish we had the time to visit it properly.

When in Italy, gelato is a must. The ice cream parlors here were leaning in hard on the Romeo and Juliet theme, so Eric got a “Coppa Julieta”.

The main square was very crowded. I wonder if this is what we can expect to see Venice as well.

I take photos; Ingrid saves her memories by scrapbooking.

When it’s just Ingrid and me for a meal (and sometimes with Adrian) we tend to watch Robinson, which is a Swedish version of Survivor. A bunch of people on an empty tropical island, with very little in the way of equipment – surviving, competing, and voting each other out, until only one remains. We’re not invested enough to watch it outside of mealtimes, so it’s taking us far longer to watch it than it took for the actual events to take place.

Today we had strawberry cake to go with the entertainment, because Ingrid felt like baking.

Look what we found on a shelf, dusty and forgotten – a gingerbread house.