Met up with a friend. He’s an avid outdoors bather and suggested that we go take a dip in a nearby lake. I’m usually not so tempted by cold-water swimming (and it cannot be anything but cold at this time of the year) because my body is not so good at regulating its temperature, but I’ve also decided to be the kind of person who says yes and tries new things, so I said yes. The place where we got into the water was a slippery rock, so there was no way to ease myself in while shivering and commenting on how cold it was. Diving right in was the only option. It was pretty horribly cold at first, but the body did acclimate. We swam all the way across the northwest arm of lake Flaten and back again.

Afterwards we baked a roll cake filled with a rhubarb compote and a mascarpone and lemon curd filling. Decorated the slices with more of the mascarpone and lemon cream, topped them with raspberries, and it looked very festive. And tasted quite delicious. If I ever bake this one again, I’d take more of the rhubarb compote and try to make the mascarpone filling a bit less sweet.

Lövsjön to Kolmården, 2 km.

The only thing left for today was to walk out of the forest to the main road at Kolmården, and then take the bus + train + bus + train combo back home. Which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. I needed the bus from Kolmården Zoo to Kolmården station. I stood at the stop for buses heading towards “Kolmården” but when the bus arrived and I got on and told the driver where I was going, he said he was going the other way. So in order to get to Kolmården station, I actually wanted the bus for Norrköping, not for Kolmården. Oh well. Luckily the next bus left only half an hour later.

Lilla Göljet to Lövsjön, 20 km. Half of stage 34 of Sörmlandsleden and all of 33.

It did indeed rain all night, sometimes lighter, sometimes heavier, and stopped at around eight, at which point I got going.

Everything was wet and somewhat muddy, but there were boardwalks in most of the really muddy places.

The clouds cleared away pretty soon and I got sunshine already for my late breakfast.

After a few hours, it was as if the rain had never been at all.

Section 34 of the trail was average. Uninhabited, maybe, but that doesn’t preclude clear-cut forests.

Lunch by lake Skvättsjön, just before the end of section 34.

The first parts of section 33 were the wildest and hardest-to-walk parts of the entire trail that I can remember. Zig-zagging down steep slopes, clambering over rocks, ducking under and climbing over fallen trees. I’m glad the ground was mstly dry – doing this in the mud would have been… interesting.

All this scrambling took me back to the high cliffs of Bråviken. The view here was much more appealing than the day before yesterday: the waters of the bay were broken up by little islets, and there was a castle on the other side.

The afternoon, after the trail turned back north away from the coast, was mostly pretty pine forests. For a while the path went along the top of a ridge, probably shaped by the ice sheets ten thousand years ago. It made for nice views.

It started raining again in the early evening, with one giant rumble of thunder and a short burst of hail. I hadn’t run across any place where I could put up my tent – not even a nice space, just enough flat ground to fit me and the tent – so I kept going. At the southern tip of lake Lövsjön finally there was a space of some kind. Not much more than a roadside stop, with muddy car tracks, a worn picnic table and a trashy-looking fireplace. There was nothing more scenic to look forward to, and two-three more kilometres would take me to Kolmården with its parking lots and bus stops, so I stayed.

The magic of weather forecasts and live radar maps made my evening a lot nicer than it could have been. When I stopped, it was raining quite constantly. The radar map promised that it would stop twenty minutes later. Instead of cooking dinner and putting up my tent in the rain, I huddled under a spruce tree and waited and watched the raindrops on the surface of the lake. And indeed, the rain stopped, so at least my dinner was dry.

The night was noisy with birds again, especially cranes. I could hear them hooting and at one point glimpsed a couple of them in flight, but they turned in a different direction and didn’t come close enough to really see them.

Nävsjön to Lilla Göljen, 20 km. Sörmlandsleden stage 35 and half of 34.

I begun the day by accidentally stepping on my favourite wooden cooking spoon and breaking it. I’m going to take it with me to dispose of it, but I don’t think there’s any saving it.

The trail continued its loop around lake Nävsjön. The lake is a popular fishing spot, with “planted” rainbow trout, rental boats, and convenient fishing spots all around. How can you tell a fishing spot from a picnic spot? The fishing spot has an extra small table with a bucket, for cleaning the fish.

Apparently not all of the Sörmlandsleden trail is in Sörmland – sections 33 and 34 are mostly in Östergötland.

The usual kind of walking in the usual kinds of surroundings. Mossy bits and rocky bits and lots of pine. Probably plenty of bilberries and lingonberries later in the season.

No shortage of wellsprings around here, and also no shortage of water in them. We’ve had some decent rain recently so the groundwater levels are good.

Lunchtime came, with the usual struggles to find a suitable stopping place. I went into someone’s grassy field to get enough room to cook lunch. It was fenced in, but there were no animals and no work ongoing, so it should be OK.

The afternoon had some more boring walking. Stage 34 is described as being all uninhabited forests. And yeah, a gravel road doesn’t count as human habitation, but still, not exactly wilderness.

I reached the shelter at Lilla Göljet at five o’clock. Rain had been imminent for a while already, and it finally started raining for real just as I passed a sign 200 metres before the shelter. I normally keep walking until later than this – stopping at five means an awful lot of evening just sitting around – but this time I let the weather make the decision for me. The forecast promised rain all night. The tent is waterproof but I would still have ended up putting it up in the rain, cooking dinner in the rain, and then carrying a wet tent tomorrow.

The shelter was empty when I got there. I made myself comfortable in the corner with the best views. Half an hour later, more people arrived. In pairs, even, which meant near-constant talking between them. They weren’t any more chatty than any other normal people would be, but I had imagined being here in the quiet on my own.

On the other hand, one of those people immediately decided that we needed a fire. Which was very cosy. I know how to make a fire but somehow it just didn’t seem worth the effort, just for me. So that was nice.

Nävekvarn to Nävsjön, 12 km – Sörmlandsleden stage 36.

My progress with the Sörmlandsleden trail is currently limited by transport options. Getting to Nävekvarn took almost four hours and involved four legs: commuter train, bus replacing ordinary train, train, and another bus.

For similar reasons, I’m starting this hike in Nävekvarn and walking backwards to Kolmården. The travel options to and from Nävekvarn gave me 4 different choices, arriving at three-hour intervals. Whereas Kolmården is a popular destination and has buses at least every half-hour Walking the “right” way and arriving in Nävekvarn on the last day and then having to wait 3 hours to get on a bus did not sound convenient at all. Now I just had a 40-minute pause in Nyköping, with a view of Nyköping central park.

I didn’t spot the information boards that are always there at the start of each stage of the trail. The first signs of trail markings that I saw was this extraordinarily sad-looking signpost. Would this be symptomatic of the whole day? Scruffy signs along the edges of small-town streets?

Indeed not. Even before I left Nävekvarn, the trail took a detour to make a loop around the small island of Skäret, just for the scenic views. If you look for Nävekvarn on a high-level map of Sweden, it’s inland and looks to be far from the sea. But Nävekvarn (and Kolmården) are situated on the northern coast of Bråviken, a long and narrow bay in the Baltic sea.

The weather was very changeable, and with the trail going in and out of trees, I was constantly adjusting my clothes. Sunglasses on, sunglasses off. Zipper up, zipper down. Hands tucked into pockets, hands out.

After Skäret the trail climbed up onto a high cliff, with even wider views that are marketed as fabulous. They were wide, but not very interesting – there was mostly just unbroken sea to look at, and a thickly forested shore on the other side. The only interesting bit – something for the eyes to catch on – was the old Marviken power station on the other side of the water.

The trail swung away from the coast and into forest. The forests here are protected so it was lovely walking. Never very far from roads, but apart from a few signposts here and there, it felt like civilization was distant.

The forest was all lush and green. May is the most beautiful time of the year. Everything is fresh and full of new life.

There were many small rocky streams. A few larger ones had supported small local ironworks in the 17th century. Including the river in Nävekvarn – “kvarn” means “mill”, and the water mill there used to power bellows for smelting iron.

A cemetery for victims of a cholera epidemic in 1855. Th only signs of it existing were old, hand-made plaques commemorating those buried there. I wonder how old they might be. Not 1855, I guess, but old.

There was a fair amount of the usual Sörmland pine-and-rock-and-bilberry combination.

Since I only started after lunchtime, I walked 12 km today, from Nävekvarn to Nävsjön. The main trail goes east of the lake, but there’s an extra circuit around the west side, and I was happy to lengthen my hike. Again due to transport complications the sections that I can walk this time only added up to 45 km, which is barely enough for three days. Extras are welcome.

I found a nice flat spot right next to the lake. There was supposed to be a shelter a few kilometres onwards, but this felt good to me.

A family of Canada geese – two adults and seven tiny balls of fluff – came up out of the water just as I got there and started nibbling on the grass and the fresh leaves on the bilberry bushes. At first I was so careful to keep my distance and not make any noise when I was putting my tent up, but they didn’t seem bothered by my presence at all, and walked closer to me than I had dared do myself.

The lake was busy and noisy with all sorts of water birds, big and small, all evening and again from dawn. Geese, gulls, cranes, swans.

If there are anemones flowering in the garden, there should also be anemones elsewhere. I went for a walk through the anemone fields of Hansta.

The downside of going out walking on a beautiful, sunny spring day, on a public holiday to boot, is that a lot of other people will have had the same idea. When I first got to the path, it felt almost crowded. There were two groups just ahead of me, one behind me, and a fourth one came towards us in the other direction, all talking loudly. Not, like, large groups, just couples or families, but still – I felt surrounded by crowds. I got off the path and found a nice log to sit on for a time, while the others walked further away and the mood was more like what I had come for.

Finding a usable sitting log was a challenge of its own. There were a lot of ants everywhere.

The groups were soon out of earshot and forest was quiet again. This is one of Stockholm’s designated “quiet places”.

Ever since I read about how the number of tepals on anemones varies, I can’t help paying attention to them. I don’t know where Wikipedia’s sources observed their anemones: not here at least. Flowers with eight and nine tepals are not a majority here, but very much not rare.

There are small clumps of liverwort mixed up with the anemones here and there. Their flowers look so similar, while the rest of the plants are nothing like each other at all.

The main trail through the anemone forest isn’t long, maybe a kilometre, so I took a few meanders around it.

When I had zig-zagged there and walked all the way back, I realized that I had forgotten my sit pad at the far end, where I had paused for a drink of water. Walked all the way there again, and then of course back once more. I got more of a walk out of this small forest than I usually do.

Photo walk/mini hike on Kärsön, a small island in lake Mälaren in northwestern Stockholm. I wanted something relatively nearby, and with at least a chance of liverwort: sunny slopes facing south, and a mixed forest, not pure pine on rock.

I so want spring to be here. March is not spring, I tell myself every year. It is, at best, not-winter. I didn’t let myself have very high hopes for the liverwort. But here they were! Some still in buds, barely open, but also fully blooming stands.

I had planned my walk for today because the forecast promised sunshine. There was some of that, but mostly the sky was overcast and the air quite chilly. Definitely hat and gloves weather. With nothing really growing yet, the big picture feeling was dreary.

Though some sections of the path were muddy, I got through everything with dry feet. Some balancing on fallen trees was required at times.

There was still ice in small, sheltered bays.

When the big picture is dull, I take out my macro lens and look for the small things. Liverwort. Dead, fallen trees; dead, standing trees. Not-green things growing on trees. This is always more fun in nature reserves where there is a mixture of species, and trees are allowed to fall where they fall, and remain there afterwards. Production forests tend to be less varied in what you can find.

A smattering of fresh snow and brilliant sunshine – and forecasts of sustained above-zero temperatures. This might just be the last beautiful weekend of winter for this season.

I went for a walk around lake Säbysjön on Järvafältet. First around the lake, then on the lake itself. There was a ploughed skating track on the ice, which was also great for walking.

Somewhere around the northern tip of the lake got tired of the endless views of the lake and not much else and headed back for the woods. Then got tired of the wide tracks and followed a deer track through the woods, until that petered out into nothing and I just headed roughly in the right direction based on where the sun was and where I thought I saw the open space of the lake to be.

I should have aimed for a longer circuit from the start. I got back to my starting point after only two hours of walking, and I wouldn’t have minded doing twice that.

For the first time in forever, we have a clear sky. I went out to chase the sun. Which was a real challenge, because even in the middle of the day it is so low that you can’t see it unless you find a really wide open space.

I drove to Järvafältet nature reserve and walked around the edges of its fields. Even then, distant trees often kept me from the sun.

Then I remembered the Hansta hill. If there is sun anywhere, surely the top of a hill will be the place for it.

You can really see here just how far the shadows of very normal trees reach.

Two-day company conference with Active Solution en route to and on Gistholmen. The company is really spoiling us.

We spent half of today sailing to Gistholmen.

Met up at the harbour at Strandvägen and got on the four boats that would be ours for the day.

None of the people on our boat were particularly familiar with sailing, but luckily the boats came with skippers who actually knew what they were doing. We got put to work pretty soon, though, pulling on ropes and sometimes not pulling on ropes and manning the wheel.

Sailing boats are high-tech equipment these days, with all sorts of sensors and meters. Speed, depth, the angle at which the wind hits the sails…

We left the city behind.

When we got into roomier waters, we raced the other three boats. Really the skipper did all the racing and we just did our best to follow his instructions as quickly as we could, without misunderstanding him. Which we didn’t always succeed at.

It wasn’t very windy at all, but when we caught as much wind as we could, the boat leaned quite impressively. For a non-sailor like me, at least.

I don’t know what looks weirder: the below-deck room at the angle that it actually was, or seeing everything hanging crooked because I’ve straightened out the room.

We passed some narrower bits around Vaxholm, had lunch on board, then raced the others again.

Arrived at Gistholmen and did a bit of actual conferencing.

The island is a small one. A cabin village with 21 small cabins, one larger central building with a reception, a kitchen and a great hall, and that’s about it.

I was all peopled out after the day and took a walk around the island in the early evening. Circled about 80% of the perimeter of the island.