We stayed the night at Svartsö hostel. I woke up hours before Ingrid and spent the early morning sitting in the sun and knitting.

The hostel was simple, with bunk beds and shared showers, but nice. Everything was fresh and clean and welcoming.

After a leisurely breakfast at one of the hostel’s picnic tables, we went back to the harbour (less than a kilometre away) to take the boat to the next island. Svartsö is a small island and we walked most of it yesterday; there’s not much more to see today.

The Waxholmsbolaget boats follow fixed routes, but they don’t necessarily stop at each little island every single time. This is where the semaphore comes in. That’s the round orange metal plate on a pole here: you hook it to its vertical position to signal to the boat that you want pick-up, and release it back to horizontal before you get on the boat.

Here’s one of the boats heading our way. It would have stopped here even without the semaphore – there’s plenty of people waiting to get off.

During our boat rides we learned to play gin rummy.

After forty minutes on the boat, were were in Finnhamn, our island for today. Finnhamn is a conglomeration of three small islands connected by bridges. They’re so close, and the bridges so short, that you barely even notice them as separate islands. It’s only when you look at the map to check how you can get to the best bathing spot that you see that the paths are all a tangle with a choke point in the middle.

Finnhamn is much more tourist-friendly than Svartsö. Gravel roads criss-cross the island; there are benches and grilling spots and outhouses at regular intervals, as well as a snacks kiosk and a canoe rental. We stayed on the less frequented paths where possible.

The marked SAT trail took us along the edges of Idholmen, where we got beautiful views. Like, I do realize that farmland and pine forests are also all part of the archipelago, but the rocky coasts with views over narrow straits are what really give me the archipelago vibe.

It was a hot day and the path was rocky and hilly. We were hot and sweaty and tired, and struggling to enjoy ourselves. When we got to a secluded section close to the water, we decided that we really didn’t need to wait until we got to an official bathing spot; this was more than good enough. It was a bit tricky to get into the water (and we scouted around to be sure that we would be able to get out afterwards as well). Once we were in, it was heaven. Cold, yes, but that’s exactly what we needed.

Ingrid found a shallow basin where she could play mermaid.

We timed our rest here to loop back towards the more inhabited bits of Idholmen shortly after three in the afternoon, because that’s when the farm shop would get its delivery of fresh eggs.

We bought eggs and fresh tomatoes for our lunch tomorrow. (Breakfast will be at the hostel here in Finnhamn since it’s included in the price.)

And here are the producers of those fresh eggs.

In the afternoon we walked the south-eastern loop. This was even more hilly and rocky, and somewhat less exciting.

It did take us to a great viewing platform, though. Or rather, it took us close to the viewing platform, but then for some reason there were no signs to indicate its existence. It was literally less than a hundred metres away from the marked path, but there wasn’t a single sign pointing to it. Had we not looked at a physical map earlier in the day, we would have missed it entirely. Which would have been a pity, because the views were excellent!

Dinner (and also lunch before it) at Finnhamns krog. Pizza, with a troubadour for entertainment.

This whole “going back to work” thing was not very satisfying at all. Having worked all of three days now, I took a long weekend to go hiking in the Stockholm archipelago with Ingrid. (Just kidding. Ingrid has been working until now, so this was our first chance to go hiking together. And it actually worked out well with my team as well, because the project manager is still on vacation.)

I’ve been wanting to see more of the archipelago for a while. But there’s so much of it that I don’t even know where to start. The Stockholm Archipelago Trail is a recent project that sort of packages the archipelago into a nice visitor-friendly format, selecting a bunch of “best of” islands, providing well-marked hiking trails on them, with online maps etc. This is exactly what I needed!

Today: Svartsö.

But first, getting to Svartsö. You get there by boat, either from central Stockholm or from Vaxholm. The commuter trains from Spånga are still on a half-hourly schedule due to engineering works, so we drove to Vaxholm. It’s just a 40-minute drive, which is less time than it would take us to get to central Stockholm.

Late last night it occurred to me to check for parking, which was a good thing, because it turned out to be tricky. No long-term parking near the harbour at all. It looked like we might need to park at the very far end of Vaxholm and walk 2.5 km with our packs, on asphalt. Ouch. We were lucky and found a spot in a smaller (and more expensive) long-term parking lot, which cut this walk to a half and left us time for ice cream in a harbourside shop.

The boat ride was pretty nice. The Waxholmsbolaget boats are very comfortable – like the nicest trains, except with more space to move around. Big windows, wi-fi on board, comfy seating.

On Svartsö we took five minutes to check in at the hostel and then started walking. The SAT trail here is about 17 km and is a tangle of two connected loops and a few “tails” here and there. The SAT markings were very visible when they were there, but we often thought they were too few and far between.

The trail on Svartsö is a mixture of small gravel roads between meadows and pastures, and paths through open, airy pine forest. Easy, pleasant walking.

There were several small villages on the island, various farms scattered around, two restaurants, and a general store. We didn’t see any cars. Instead, local folks used all sorts of smaller vehicles, from cargo bikes and tricycles (electric and not) and cargo mopeds to ATVs, small tractors, and strange small car/moped hybrids.

Ingrid bathed in the sea, mostly to have done it. The water looked cold and was even colder than it looked, so her swim was very short.

We spotted a lot of edible berries on Svartsö. We counted eight: bilberries, lingonberries (not quite ripe yet), wild raspberries, stone brambles, redcurrants, damsons (not really berries but small enough to count!), sloe (far from ripe), juniper. We kept our eyes peeled for wild strawberries but didn’t find any.

Raspberries were especially abundant. Wild raspberries aren’t rare in the Stockholm region, but it’s not like they’re growing everywhere, either, so we were delighted when we ran across the first good patches. Later on we actually got to a point where we could spot raspberry bushes and just walk past them.

On the east side of the island we ran across the largest raspberry patch that I’ve ever seen. Metres and metres of them! Now I understand how people can pick enough wild raspberries to make jam out of them.

More pretty meadows and pine forests on the eastern loop. We hesitated about whether to walk it or not. We had a late start on the island (only started walking around at half past two) which left us less time for completing the trail than we might have wanted. But just sitting around and doing nothing at the hostel didn’t seem like any fun at all, so we did choose to walk it all. We ended up finishing later than we had hoped and were quite tired by the end of it.

Dinner at Svartsö Bistro. Outdoor seating, friendly staff, good food, and a cute little dog running around. I wish they had more comfortable chairs, though, instead of the small cafe-style seating.

My camera lens stopped working, just like for the Venice trip last year. It’s like it’s jinxed, somehow. I’m forced to rely on the camera in my phone, and I am not happy with it at all. I had really been looking forward to taking photos on this trip, and I’m stuck with a sub-par tool.

It’s Ingrid’s last day of work at the Spånga Konditori pastry shop. We managed to time a quiet moment when I could join her for a last fika with the employee discount – and try out the current ice cream flavours. (I got black cherry, and chocolate with blood orange.)

In September, she’ll be starting a four-month internship. It’s partly a time-filler: the real next step in Ingrid’s life will be fifteen months of military service, starting in March. But for now, she has a month of summer vacation to look forward to.

Ingrid and I saw an exhibition at Waldemarsudde with four popular Finnish/Swedish/Estonian illustrators of children’s books: Tove Jansson, Ilon Wikland, Pija Lindenbaum and Linda Bondestam.

Tove Jansson is, of course, the creator of the Moomin books, which I read already when I was a child. Ilon Wikland illustrated many of Astrid Lindgren’s books, many of which were also translated into Estonian already back in the 1980s. Back when the children were children, I read a lot of those books again together with them.

I’m not sure how well known Pija Lindenbaum is outside of Sweden, but she is very well-known here. She has been giving out at least one book a year since, like, 1990, and some of the best ones came out just as Ingrid was in the picture book age, so we read those over and over again.

Linda Bondestam became active more recently, after Ingrid and Adrian had outgrown picture books, so I hadn’t come into contact with her work before.

I loved this exhibition. There was lots of material, not just originals of the finished illustrations themselves (which were numerous) but also early sketches, notes, colour palettes, character studies, storyboards, etc. A fascinating look behind the scenes.

The illustrations themselves were interesting. Sometimes much smaller than I had thought (especially some Moomin drawings were tiny) and sometimes much larger (Linda Bondestam likes to work on a large scale).

Fascinating to see the tiny means by which a wolf’s eyes and snout can communicate its mood and feelings.

Seeing the pictures all like this, without any text and story to distract from them, highlighted the importance of layout. A normal picture utilises a canvas in whatever way it wants: sometimes all of it, sometimes just a part. But an illustration (at least in modern children’s books) takes text layout into account from the start. Sometimes leaving room for a lot of text, sometimes just a line or two. Sometimes stretching out to overlap with the text, or reaching out of its assigned area to play with space.

I was surprised to see how boldly Tove Jansson used colour in some of her works. In my mind the Moomin illustrations are black and white ink drawings, and where they are in colour (such as in Vem ska trösta Knyttet) it’s mostly plain fields of colour. But here were some very dynamic scenes.

Now I feel like re-reading all the Moomin books, and other works by Tove Jansson as well.

Happy early birthday to me! Adrian will be away at scout camp on my actual birthday, so we celebrated today. A summery salad, the traditional redcurrant cake, and board games.

I’m not an expert baker but the cake came out exactly as it should. Even with the additional challenge of trying to bake it in 28-degree heat. The dough went from “so chilled it’s hard to roll out” to “so warm that it melts” before I managed to fully roll it out. I ended up pressing it in place with my fingers, and then putting it in the fridge again to keep it from melting before it could be baked.

The cake rose like a souffle in the oven, above the edges of the cake tin, but sank down within its walls again as it cooled.

A full day. In the morning, a picnic outing to Taevaskoda. Then bathing at Kiidjärve lakeside beach. In the evening all the children participated in a charity run.

Taevaskoda is mostly as it has always been. A bit more people, I guess – at one point it felt like a whole busload arrived. And it all feels smaller than it used to, when I was a child.

I crossed the river and climbed to the top of the cliff to look down on our picnic site. The wear and tear on the grassy meadow was striking.

The river is shallow but fast-flowing and rather cold.

It’s a very scenic spot, but we’ve been here enough times that most of us barely look around us. Get there, eat picnic, get back. I kind of wish I could spend a bit more time just looking at the surroundings.

After the picnic, we drove to Kiidjärve for bathing. There’s a nice grassy slope down to the water, and it never feels crowded, although there are always people here. The water gets deep quickly, which works out great now that the kids are older and comfortable in deep water.

Somehow they ended up doing yoga poses in water. First just while standing, and then Ingrid and Adrian wanted to do the same also while jumping. The timing was most tricky – both for the two of them to jump at the same moment, and for me to press the trigger at the appropriate time.

In the evening there was a charity run where the audience threw colourful powder at the runners. Adrian and Ingrid came back bright green and pink.

Buying Estonian candy is a necessary part of a trip to Estonia.

Likewise, eating Estonian cake. This was a sea buckthorn cake with cream cheese and chocolate.

We spent the day at Kapsta with my father and his wife.

Made our traditional home-made sushi lunch.

Enjoyed lunch out in the gazebo tent since the weather remains horribly hot.

Went for a walk in the early evening when the temperature had cooled a bit. Still 25 degrees but at least it’s not 29 any more.

My father’s back is in a bad enough shape that he’s probably not going to be taking any more walks in his life.

There are no pea fields this year. Beans and wheat instead.

A hot and rainy day. Had the weather been better, we might have gone to the adventure park in Otepää, like we do must summers. Now we chose indoor climbing instead – or bouldering, to be more precise. “We” here being the next generation (Ingrid, Adrian, and my Estonian friends’ kids) and me. The rest of the older generation were all either working, or not the climbing kind of people. Occasionally I feel a bit weird, being the only mum in a group that’s otherwise mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings and one brave nine-year-old. But I’m young at heart, eh?

The first room had the traditional kind of bouldering wall with colour-coded routes going crossways and sideways. Then we found the other room, which had a series of twenty-odd competition routes. The first couple were easy, the next few were doable, and beyond that they got more and more bizarre. It’s hard to even picture someone climbing some of them.

In the evening we went paddleboarding. Or “SUP riding”, which in Estonian sounds identical to “soup riding”.

There were heavy showers earlier in the day and heavy clouds even now; even some warnings of thunder. Thunder would have forced us to cancel; heavy rain would have been unpleasant. In the end we were lucky to get neither.

We had a safety and technique lecture on the shore, and then we were allowed on the boards and the water. Initially we were all wobbly and stayed on our knees, while swarming in the little bay we started in.

We left the bay and started paddling our way up the Emajõgi river. When we had worked up a little bit of speed, it didn’t take long for us to find our balance and stand up, like the name suggests you’re supposed to. It took longer for the knees and legs to stop shaking slightly from all the balancing that was going on.

The stand-up paddling was OK, but most of us concluded after a while that the standing-up part was rather unnecessary. You get much more leverage and control when you’re closer to the water. Canoes just make sense. Some of us went back to kneeling; many sat cross-legged.

I was all set to be camera-less during this activity, but the life jackets turned out to have a zippered chest pocket which fit my phone, and I had a little waterproof bag that also fit my phone, so I could take photos after all. I struggle to get the exposure right on the phone – in many non-standard lighting situations the photos come out way too dark and I need to adjust them a lot afterwards. But I’m glad I have these.