Last year’s canoe trip on Ahja river was a hit so we did it again, but slightly differently. One canoe rental place has invented/introduced canoe rafts – three canoes attached to each other, with a wooden platform on top. It handles like a raft, sturdy, no wobbles. A bit less nimble but still decently steerable.

The big bonuses are that it’s much more social than a bunch of individual canoes – and it is very child- and dog-friendly.

There was eleven of us, and we ended up with one raft of adults and one of kids, with one dog each.

The dogs had to be split up and weren’t entirely happy about it. But two large, playful dogs on a raft getting the zoomies or starting to tussle with each other would have been too chaotic. They longed for each other, though, or perhaps they just wanted their herd to be all in one place.

We were on the same lake and river as last year, but only did half the distance, and in the other direction (upriver). Not that it felt like the direction made much of a difference – mostly we paddled along a lake with no noticeable flow.

At around the halfway point we steered our rafts into a little bay, tied them to each other, and had a lovely picnic. The rafts made it very easy. Dogs and paddles and kids and food everywhere.

The lake turned into a river for the last kilometre or so, and the paddling was more challenging now, with logs, submerged broken branches, sand banks and other obstacles.

I got fewer photos this year since the rafts didn’t exactly allow any darting around to the side to get new angles on things. And with four of us paddling, I couldn’t just stop my part whenever I felt like it, or we’d end up going in circles. Ingrid helped out and took over the camera for a while, too.

Ingrid’s most favourite burger ever, that she’s been looking forward to for a year. The sweet potato burger at Veg Machine at Aparaaditehas.

As usual, the trip to Estonia wouldn’t feel complete without a visit to the adventure park at Otepää.

Thanks to Ingrid, I have some photos of me climbing as well.

The last trail is challenging for all of us. Now that Adrian is as tall as the rest of us, we’re on an equal footing.

That trail ends with the so-called Tarzan leap – hold on to a thick rope and leap off a platform to swing across a twenty-metre gap to a net on the other side. After a few attempts it no longer feels scary – as long as I don’t stop to think about it.

Of course we’re all harnessed and clipped into things so there’s no real risk.

The trails all end with zipline rides, which is like the cherry on top.

Finally the two long zipline rides across the valley and back cap off the entire day.

The Hansapäevad festival has shrunken and simplified into a Hansalaat market. Gone is most of the medieval feel and all the cultural activities; we’re left with just a market. Which is still fun but not the same thing.

We had vaguely planned for a picnic but then the kids ended up just eating market food instead. Bubble waffles. If I’d had more energy, I’d maybe have tried to argue for a picnic but I didn’t. Perhaps that was a good thing, because we got hit by several surprise rain showers later in the day.

After browsing the market we went to Toomemägi and climbed the cathedral ruins there.

Dogs and kids with bad knees stayed down below.

My friends are all dog owners now, and the dogs are on the large and energetic side. The easiest way for us all to meet up is to go out for a walk with the dogs.

I ran ahead a bit to get some distance for the photo. I suspect Ingrid lined them all up in the meantime.

I’m off to Estonia with the kids, to visit family and friends.

We’ve always used Tallink ferries to get there (apart from the early days when I flew) but this time we’re trying a different approach. Tallink never reinstated the second ferry (after cutting down from daily trips to every other day during the covid pandemic) and now their schedule doesn’t suit us. I went looking for alternatives. Flight + rent a car? Expensive. Different ferry line? Better schedule, better prices, better times, but less convenient harbours. Worth a try.

DFDS leaves from Kapellskär which is further away from us than central Stockholm. On the Estonian side they go to Paldiski instead of Tallinn, which is further from Tartu but on larger roads. Tallink ferries are basically floating hotels and act accordingly: there are lavish tax-free shops, onboard entertainment, plenty of restaurants, and they try to keep you there as long as possible to squeeze the most money out of you. DFDS on the other hand just focuses on getting you there: leaves several hours later, and gets there several hours earlier. Which suits us really well. The ferry experience was fun for the kids when they were young, but now we’re all just waiting for time to pass and wishing we could get there sooner.

I enjoyed watching the crew play Tetris with all the large lorries.

Today is leaving and flying home day, so we’re not doing anything exciting. Here are some photos of our lovely hotel instead. Hotel Andreas in Kamari. Great location, wonderful environment and ambience, good beds, great service, decent breakfast.



I think we had the best room in the whole place, with a balcony facing the beautiful, lush front garden with bougainvilleas and lemon trees and cactuses and umbrella trees.

Breakfast in the garden was a very pleasant start for every day.

We are sort of running out of hikes on this island. I can understand why many hiking holidays combine half a week on Santorini with half a week on Naxos. I did find one more promising walk near Kamari, though. Not to any place special – just from one village to another.

Small cobbled streets, ordinary small houses, no crowds. Nice.

I made a serious tactical miscalculation, though. The walk was less than 5 km, which is far less than we usually walk, so I thought we could do it there and back again. Start in Kamari, walk to the other village, turn around and walk back home again.

What I didn’t take into account was the heat, firstly, and secondly the altitude gain. The other village was up on a bit of a hill. And climbing a hill in this heat was more than we could do. The first bit was flat, but after 10 or 15 minutes of climbing, and realizing that we still had at least another hour of that ahead of us, we gave up.

At that point we’d reached a small plateau on the hillside with pretty nice views – looked like a local picnic spot – so we felt like we’d walked to some place at least, not just nowhere, and we were all very much OK with turning back, after admiring and photographing the views.

After all the walking and touristing – the boat ride was surprisingly tiring and we walked more steps than we had thought – we took the day off today and just hung on the beach. Well in shade under large parasols, because none of us particularly wanted to get sunburned. Good books, smoothies and other snacks, and even a little bit of bathing.

Boat trip to the three smaller islands next to Santorini – Nea Kameni, Palea Kameni and Thirassia.

The trip was arranged by the travel company we travelled with. Buses collected people at various points along the island and disgorged all of us at the harbour, where we were split across three boats based on our preferred language. Our boat and its two sisters were the epitome of a touristy ridiculousness, including fake masts.

Nea Kameni is the island at the middle of the Santorini caldera. It first emerged about two thousand years ago and has grown as ongoing minor eruptions have added more and more lava to it. The newer parts are still pure rock with nothing growing on them yet.

The island is small and the tourists many, so it felt like an outdoor museum of sorts, with marked paths everywhere.

In the middle of the island we could see the main crater of the volcano. It’s still active and there’s steam and smoke coming out of cracks in the rock, over on the other side where the rocks are covered with white deposits of something.

The same yellow tufts of some hardy desert plant that we saw on our hike from Fira to Oia are the first ones to spread here as well.

The second island, Palea Kameni, is so small that the boats don’t even land there. They stop a small distance away to give the tourists a chance to swim to the hot springs next to the island – where the water is rust-coloured.

The third island, Thirassia, is older – a part of the island that existed before the Minoan eruption. Old enough to have some vegetation and human habitation. The boats stopped here for lunch.

The restaurants at the bottom of the path all had very low ratings on Google Maps so we made the trek to the top. It was very, very hot and sweaty, and there was as usual no shade to be found on the way. Even though it wasn’t a long way to walk, we felt near fainting when we got to the top.


The stray cats on this island were all looking very scraggly. We missed Nysse.

The way down felt a lot easier.

On our way back to the port on Santorini we got some nice views of the villages we walked through and past yesterday.

There’s the rock of Skaros with its castle ruins in the middle, that we visited yesterday.

Layers of volcanic rock.