One of the highlights of our Estonia trip is always the adventure park at Otepää. The coronavirus situation means that we get no trip to our friends and family in Estonia, so no visit to Otepää either.

I found two adventure parks similar to Otepää near Stockholm, and today we tried out the first of them – Accropark at Lida.

Eric unfortunately still had a sore back from our Gotland trip – too much sitting in the car and too many nights in on the wrong mattresses – so he couldn’t join us up in the trees.

I couldn’t help comparing Accropark to the park at Otepää.

Much of it was very similar. There are obstacle courses/climbing trails up in the pine trees that you follow from platform to platform, while a carabiner hooked onto a cable keeps you safe at all times. The obstacles can be anything – plank walkways, nets, wobbly assemblies of logs and cable, etc. There are courses of various difficulties, ranging from “good for kids” to “requires real physical exertion”.

At Otepää, a ticket allows you to climb each trail once. Accropark tickets are timed and you can climb as much as you want during your two-hour slot. This is nice in theory, because you can skip the basic courses and do your favourite harder courses several times. But they sell too many tickets to each slot. There was a lot of waiting in queues at each course start and at the platforms.

The park at Lida was crammed into a much smaller area. The courses criss-crossed each other and the ground area felt nearly cramped. I found it a bit difficult to navigate. It was fine as long as we strictly followed the difficulty order, because the start of the next course was always close to the end of the previous one. But finding the start of, say, the “Blue+” course among all the stuff was not very easy.

The courses themselves also felt smaller, although I’m not sure how much that was actually the case and how much was my subjective experience due to the denser arrangement. I think the courses probably had roughly the same number of obstacles, but many individual sections/obstacles were shorter than I had become used to. This plus all the queueing meant that I got less climbing and more waiting than I had expected.

Accropark had a really clever security solution on their courses. The harnesses at Otepää have two carabiners that you move from cable to cable, one at a time, so you’re always attached by at least one. The harnesses at Accropark have one normal carabiner that you move yourself, and one red that is permanently attached to the cable that you simply cannot remove. Getting it from one cable section to the next one took a bit of practice, but was quite convenient once I got the hang of it. Adrian and Ingrid are experienced climbers by now and wouldn’t forget to clip on, but when they were beginners, this solution would have removed one big worry for me.

There was one real disappointment for me at Accropark, and that was the zipline rides. They were just plain uncomfortable. The harness I got had me hanging so high up that the zipline cable was level with my eyes. I was constantly thinking about how to keep my head away from the cable (and failed once when I got spun around and the cable chafed the back of my head). I don’t know if the harness was badly designed or if I got the wrong size or something.

Several of the short rides between platforms also ended with really hard stops with a strong yank to the harness and nothing to soften the braking. Actually painful. The long zipline rides across the valley at Otepää are the best part of the park; here I didn’t even try the pure zipline courses because my experience on the short ones sucked so badly.

Ingrid and Adrian were both happy with the park and would be glad to go there again. Ingrid managed all the courses including the hardest “Red+” (although that one was a real challenge for her). Adrian did everything except that Red+.

I think we’ll try the other park at Vaxholm next time.

Bonus memory from Lida: the countless cute rabbits nibbling on the grass everywhere, including babies looking no bigger than my hand.

We are leaving Fårösund behind and heading towards Visby again, so we can take the ferry back tomorrow.

First stop: Stenkusten, the stone coast. This place looks unreal and a bit spooky. The beach is all stones, nothing else, in even-looking layers, looking almost artificial in their arrangement. At the top, furthest from the water, is a very flat surface of sharp-edged chunks of crushed limestone, which looks as if it came out of a production line at a cement factory and was evened out by a bulldozer. Next to the flat is a steep slope towards the sea, and then a flat surface again, but here the stones have been bleached white and tumbled to rounded shapes.

Next we headed for the lakeside beach of Tingstäde Träsk. Adrian wanted a beach where the water was warm and didn’t have any waves. When we got there, we were met by signs warning us of swimmer’s itch. Well, maybe a more protected seaside beach, then? But by now it was time for lunch, and finding a veggie-friendly lunch spot was not as easy in this part of Gotland as in Visby, and when we were done with lunch the weather had turned cold and windy again.

We postponed the bathing to another day and played minigolf instead. Through mostly dumb luck I won the game – I hit several holes with shots that I had no real hope for.

A full day of Fårö.

The ferry trip, which at peak times can involve hour-long queues, went quickly. Gotland in general seems to be relatively empty of tourists right now. Today the weather is wet and windy so almost nobody wants to make a day trip to Fårö. We shared the car ferry with just 5 other cars.

Initially we had a somewhat structured plan for exploring the island, but in practice Fårö is so small that you can criss-cross it repeatedly in an hour. So we just drove wherever we felt like.

First we headed south and wandered around Ryssnäset for a bit. It was seriously windy. We found more fossils, and plenty of tiny clams.



From there we turned north to see the rauk at Gamlehamn. It’s got a large, individualized rauk icon on the map so it’s got to be impressive!

The famous one is vaguely dog-shaped one with two supports. It had many companions, and all together they made for an interesting place: the rocky coastline was broken up and varied, not like the straight and even stony beaches we’ve seen before. This place really invited to scrambling and jumping from rock to rock.




After lunch we drove east to Fårö lighthouse. Not a very interesting sight. But at the end of the road, beyond the lighthouse, there was a wonderful sandy beach, which we had all to ourselves!



The weather was still windy and the water was pretty cold. Eric and Adrian took a very quick dip and then stayed on the beach instead.

Ingrid however absolutely loved this! The cold didn’t bother her much, and the beach was made extra wonderful today by waves. Well, they weren’t large waves on any absolute scale, but for a kid who has had to make do with Mälaren and Kyrksjön and other very placid bathing spots, this was exquisite fun. She jumped the waves for a long, long time. I stayed with her for as long as I could, sharing her enjoyment. We kept looking for the spot with the best waves. Ingrid cheered every time we got one that was large enough to break into foam and was literally jumping up and down with excitement. Afterwards she said this was the highlight of the whole trip for her.


Afterwards we took the long way back towards the ferry harbour, driving past the rauk area on the north-west side of Fårö. Eric and Ingrid had had enough of rauks and rocky coasts by now so towards the end they stayed in the car while Adrian and I went out to climb and scramble among the rocks (and take photos).



Parts of the coastline here looked like something from another planet. There was water, and there were rocks in various tones of gray – and nothing else. Not even the smallest sprig of grass.

We’re leaving Visby behind and heading north and then north-east towards Fårösund, stopping whenever we feel like it.

The first stop was already at Lummelunda even though we were there only yesterday. There’s a nature trail there that’s supposed to be nice, but we didn’t the chance to walk it yesterday. After our visit to the caves it was high time for lunch, but the café there had no proper vegetarian dishes so we started cycling back towards Visby to find food. Today we were properly fed and did that walk. It was rather underwhelming and the signage was laughably unclear and out of date.

Next stop: Lickershamn, to see our first rauk – the Jungfrun. The rauk was cool, but the walk from the village to the rauk was actually even nicer. It’s mostly pine forest, which we do admittedly get a lot of near Stockholm as well, but it’s different here. The ground here is limestone instead of granite, so the undergrowth is completely different. It looks and smells like the pine forests of my childhood. (I lived in Tartu as a child but spent most summers near Tallinn, where the forests were just like this.)

Ingrid and Adrian were more interested in the WW2-era concrete bunker that was situated high on a clifftop near the rauk.


After lunch we drove all of 8 km north to the next beach, at Ireviken. (Gotland is so small that we could start driving towards our next hotel at dinnertime and still make it there before the night.)

Ireviken one was recommended by the internet as a nice bathing spot and, even more interestingly, as a great place for fossil hunting.

We spent a lot of time searching for fossils. At first when we looked at the rocks we couldn’t see anything other than pretty smooth rocks, all white and tumbled into round shapes by the sea – but mostly featureless. But when we sat down and looked more closely, there were fossils everywhere, of all kinds of shapes and sizes! There were fossils clearly shaped like seashells and snail shells, fossils that looked like corals, and loads of small round shapes.


This was definitely today’s highlight and we had a lot of fun combing through the rocks.

When we finally had enough of fossils, we had a quick swim in the sea. The water was pretty cold, but we wanted to at least take a dip so we could say we’d done it – just in case we don’t get a better chance. Swedish summer weather can be unreliable.

Because of the coronavirus situation, our annual Estonia trip and our equally-annual hiking trip both get added to the long list of “things we were looking forward to but had to cancel”.

Non-essential travel in Sweden is now allowed, though, and I’ve been vacillating about whether and where and how we should travel.

On the one hand, we don’t need to travel. But on the other hand, if we’re careful and avoid crowds and travel by car and don’t go too far (so we can get home if anyone falls ill despite everything) then it should be OK.

On the one hand, this might be the best time ever to travel to e.g. Gotland. No crowds, hopefully, which would be really nice. (Adrian’s and my trip to the empty Old Town in Stockholm was my best time there, ever.) And the hospitality industry could do with some support or the whole bunch will go bankrupt. But on the other hand, what if everyone thinks like that, and we’ll be one of a gazillion annoying Stockholmers there?

We took the chance, in the end, and here we are on Gotland. We arrived in mid-afternoon and spent the rest of the day simply walking around the town, following the city wall.

The wall is pretty amazing. It’s worn and dilapidated and none of the towers are standing (unlike some of the medieval towers in Tallinn for example). But the wall itself is still standing along its entire length, and you can follow it all the way around the centre of Visby, which is pretty darn impressive.

I am surprised at how much vegetation I see growing on the wall everywhere. It looks pretty, but roots generally tend to weaken walls, so I would have expected it all to be cleaned away.

It was too hot to even go swimming during the day, other than a few dips in the kids’ inflatable pool. Ingrid and I went swimming at night instead, some time past 10 pm. The grassy field at Maltesholmsbadet was far from empty, but there were only a very few people in the water.

It’s hot outside and inside. The mornings are OK but from lunchtime onwards the heat becomes unpleasant. It’s 28°C in the shade.

Working is difficult; my brain turns into porridge in this heat and I just have no energy.

I actually took a break after a few hours of working for a trip to Kyrksjön with Ingrid.

One more day to survive and then I’ll go on vacation and can just hang around and do nothing during the hottest hours.

We played Cluedo.

The first round went quickly so we played a second round. In this round, all of us realized at about the same time that something was wrong. Just as Ingrid was saying “hm, that doesn’t add up” and Eric commented that he must have made a mistake in his note-taking, I was realizing that my notes didn’t allow for anyone to be the murderer. Somehow we had put two place cards and one murder weapon in the envelope (instead of one place, one murderer and one weapon).

Official Midsummer celebrations with maypoles and music such are not happening this year due to covid-19. We usually have a Midsummer picnic somewhere. And we don’t need an official celebration for that!

Most Swedes celebrate on Midsummer’s Eve. I didn’t have time to plan or prepare anything for yesterday, so we had our picnic today instead, at Hammarskog. Normally there would be a folk band and a maypole and dancing around it, but Hammarskog is a nice picnic spot without all that as well. There’s a wide open lawn sloping towards a view of a lake, and trees all around.


We had a nice and leisurely picnic lunch with silltårta and devilled eggs, and a strawberry and elderflower cake.

The cake was almost the same one as last year, because it was so delicious. (Here’s the recipe, possibly behind a paywall.) This year we transformed it into a Swiss roll, though, because Swiss rolls are more fun than cake-shaped cakes, and easier to transport. The marinated strawberry filling went inside the roll, and we spooned the elderflower curd on top of each slice, and then piled strawberries on top.

After lunch hung around for a while and didn’t quite feel like going home yet. Then we decided to play games. Apparently that’s a tradition at Midsummer parties, which I wasn’t aware of. Now I know. Femkamp, meaning a contest in five different “events”, is the most traditional form. We had no plans and no equipment with us, so we improvised with what we had and tried to find events that can be done more or less equally by all ages, even when wearing a somewhat impractical dress.

• Frisbee throwing with a lunch box lid
• Kast med liten sko, i.e. shoe throwing
• Pin the tail on the donkey (with a few post-its to mark the donkey on the lawn)
• Strawberry-and-spoon race
• Counting to two minutes (with your eyes closed)

Ingrid won every single one of them. But we all had fun, even though the thistles in the lawn bothered Adrian’s bare toes. Even my mum, who can be a bit stiff and “proper” sometimes, went all in!

The lunch box lid made a surprisingly good frisbee. It flew quite well, and even curved the same way a normal frisbee does.

Many of our neighbours apparently partied in their houses instead: there were a lot of noisy parties going on yesterday. People were getting drunk at 6 pm already, and continuing well into the night, some getting rather rowdy.

Ingrid wanted to recreate the pose of the lady on the packaging of this inflatable donut. It looked quite uncomfortable at first – the lady chose a pose where the donut’s hard plastic handles, invisible in the photo, end up right behind her back and under her legs. It turned out to be not quite that bad, but not particularly comfortable either – that top arm has no support at all.