Ingrid and I cycled to Ursvik. As on previous occasions, geocaching took us to cool, interesting and nice places that we would otherwise never have visited. For example, en route from our 3rd cache to the 4th one along the old military railway embankment, we found the best strawberry place ever: endless amounts of plump, juicy berries! We left because we were stuffed, well before we ran out of strawberries!

And at the end of the embankment we found what I believe to be an old train platform right next to the tunnel entrance for what is probably an underground storage bunker. Too bad I didn’t think of taking any photos of that place – I was too busy searching for the cache. It required a bit of rock climbing and was the trickiest one we’ve found thus far in terms of terrain.

Ingrid’s view:

We went canoeing on Albysjön. Paddled a bit, then pushed our canoes into the reeds along the side of the lake and had fika.

Adrian and I went out geocaching in Järvafältet (between Tensta and Husby). We found two caches, one of them in the middle of a cow pasture. We also found a lot of cowpats.

We went out for a walk in the woods near Hellasgården. The GPS unit died because of batteries but Hellasgården offered beginner-level orienteering maps (the easiest version had 5 control points and less than 3 km to walk) so we practised our map-reading skills instead.

The kids were fighting each other all the time and Adrian in particular was angry about everything. So what could have been a nice outing ended with everybody angry at everybody else, and we came home in a worse mood than we left.

I got to swim for the first time this summer though.

Ingrid’s class had a picnic/outing/thing. Grilled hot dogs, cake, dozens of kids running around in the woods and playgrounds.

I barely saw Ingrid during our two hours there and we had to search for her when it was time to go home.

Adrian hung out with us. He has some sort of a stomach bug and was not feeling too well. And running around with dozens of big kids is not his idea of fun anyway. He explored quietly, climbed a bit. Fell asleep in the car on the way home and then slept 13 hours straight.

I dragged the kids out for some geocaching, this time in Ursvik.

We found some really exciting caches there that the authors had put a lot of work into. One was “camouflaged” as a beautiful bird house; another was hidden inside a very realistic-looking rubber snake.

We picked Ursvik because Ingrid wanted to climb the activity trail there.

It had been raining yesterday and all night too, so much of the ground was muddy. This provided opportunities for additional muddy, watery activities.

The climbing ended with Adrian slipping off a stone into the muddy water. Luckily that spot was not too deep – only his shoes got soaked, so he went on barefoot.

If he had ended up like the kid next to him – flat on his stomach in the middle of the pond – we would have had to drive home and thus missed out on the sausage grilling we had planned as the finale for our outing.

“This is my stone, you don’t have to sit right where I am!”

We went out for a bit of geocaching in the afternoon, in Lunda. I had planned for a longer outing in a wilder place, but Ingrid was coughing so much this morning that we had to cancel those plans. But Lunda is 15 minutes away by bike (at Ingrid’s pace) and there is a decent-sized green space which includes an iron age burial ground and some traces of a very old village, as well as a nice large playground with an archaeological theme (Viking ships etc).

I learned today that the burial ground in Lunda is the largest site with iron age graves in Stockholm. And we bagged our first multi-caches.

The weather reports promised warm and sunny weather for this afternoon and I had built up a serious nature deficit, so I took the whole family for a long walk in the nature reserve at Järvafältet.

To make the whole outing fun for the kids, who like the idea of going for forest walks with me in principle but then usually tire very quickly and start whining about tired legs, we tried out geocaching for the first time.

It worked out great – even better than I had hoped. The tired legs didn’t make an appearance until after several hours, by which time I’m sure it was real tiredness rather than just boredom.

I wished for (and got) a hand held GPS unit for Christmas for this very reason, for exactly this kind of outing. This morning I loaded it up with a bunch of easy caches within a few kilometres of the parking lot near Ingrid’s riding school at the south-western edge of the nature reserve.

We had lunch next to Säby lake with hundreds of water birds making noise on the lake. Then we looked for and found two caches which took us to some really scenic spots in the forest. Finally we aimed for a third cache at a picnic area where we grilled sausages.

Ingrid loved the whole geocaching thing. She likes having a goal and a purpose, challenges, scoring points, finding things. She was very excited that it was she who spotted two of the caches, and already wants to go out for more tomorrow.

We skied. We queued. Ingrid also had just over an hour of ski school every day.

We had pancakes for breakfast (at least Ingrid did) and classy dinners at the hotel restaurant. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food at the hotel – my veggie dinner was excellent, and breakfast included bread that must have been fresh from a local bakery.

Lunch consisted of hamburgers at the fast-food place at the bottom of the slope, for three days in a row. I had serious cravings for fresh fruit and vegetables by Sunday evening.

We didn’t have much luck with the weather. It was cloudy and windy, so the views weren’t much to look at. But it meant that the slopes were not at all crowded. And we felt lucky anyway, because just as we were skiing down for the last time on Sunday afternoon, more and more lifts were being shut down due to the wind. We also felt lucky to be able to fly back home instead of another three-hour bus ride.

Today was incredibly windy. Down in the valley, even down between the trees, it was just a bit windy. Up at the top of the mountains the wind was so hard that the highest lift was closed because of it. (Later in the afternoon more lifts were closed.)

We struggled to walk against the wind, and were pushed sideways when we sat on the ski lift. Skiing downhill we had the wind in our faces, braking us, but it felt like we were racing down. All fresh tracks were obliterated almost immediately. It wasn’t snowing, but a little fresh snow must have fallen during the night, because the wind was blowing up flurries everywhere, and looking across the mountaintops (rather than down towards the village) the whole world was white.

Then we got down between the trees and it was just a normal day again.