There is a hiking trail at Kauksi. We walked the trail and we ate blueberries and had fun. But none of it could compare to the beach.

Empty and flat. Endless.

Even though the weather was cold, the children played for hours. There were shallows where the water barely covered the sand, and a lagoon with warmer water, both of which offered great conditions for digging – and for photography.

We only left because of the threatening thunderclouds that appeared in the early afternoon. A speedy hike back to the cars saved us just in the nick of time; the rain came pouring down while we were driving back.

Our annual visit to Otepää adventure park with a bunch of friends and kids. Ingrid on all five trails; Adrian on three; all three of us on the ziplines.

Rain seemed again to be imminent several times but never actually materialized.

Ingrid doing the “Tarzan leap”:

The skies continue to threaten us with rain so we looked for indoor activities today. We went to the Palamuse school museum with my father and his wife.

This museum is built in and around an old parish school, which is famous in Estonia because of a book & movie (“Kevade”) that takes place here. We started planning this visit with my (step)parents already some months ago. I read “Kevade” with Adrian in the spring so that he would understand all the references and know what the story is about.


We visited both the schoolroom with its benches and blackboard etc, and the rooms where the parish clerk / school headmaster lived – bedroom, kitchen, living room etc. In the schoolroom Ingrid practised writing with a nib pen and ink. Adrian tried writing on slate, and ringing the school bell. Meanwhile I browsed old schoolbooks. I loved the maths problems, very practically oriented!

The kitchen maid gets a salary of 96 rubles a year; after 8 months of service she left her job and got 29 rubles from her master. How much salary had she withdrawn during the year?

A farmer sold 8 chetverts of wheat and 12 chetverts of rye, for the wheat he got 72 rubles. How much did he get for the rye, if 9 chetverts of rye costs the same as 5 chetverts of wheat?

There was also a modern annex with an exhibition that has information about the book, schools in Estonia in the late 19th/early 20th century, the history of parish schools in Estonia, etc. Quite interesting and well-presented, I thought. The annex also had hands-on exhibits, based mostly on memorable scenes from the book. You can spin Toots’ red wooden globe and find all the landmarks on it, and dig through all the stuff in his pockets, and climb the pantry shelves to get to the “Lati pats” wine bottles.

In the afternoon we did a quick tour of Tartu’s latest and greatest graffiti paintings.

In Tartu. In the afternoon & evening our friend group hung out in the garden of one of said friends. In addition to three bunches of children of various ages, there was also a young, very friendly playful dog.

Ingrid was very hesitant to begin. She doesn’t like dogs jumping up on her, and she definitely doesn’t like them licking her and getting dog slobber on her face. Being young and fond of people, and frankly not very disciplined, of course this dog greeted us all by immediately jumping and licking all over us.

Neither Ingrid nor Adrian have much experience with dogs and don’t know what to expect, or how to read a dog’s mood. What if it bites? So it’s natural to be cautious around a large dog like this. But the others clearly had a lot of fun playing with the dog, so Ingrid hovered there indecisively, torn between wanting to play and not quite daring to. As the evening passed, she dared more and more.

This year’s song festival was the festival’s 150th jubilee. I can’t say whether it was grander than the “ordinary” ones, I haven’t been to enough of these to have anything to compare to. But it was pretty darn impressive. 100,000 people on the festival grounds, 30,000 performers and 70,000 in the audience. Around the 100,000 person mark, ticket sales were simply stopped for security reasons.

I heard that there were plenty of people who had come from afar and hoped to buy tickets at the gate, and were then turned away. Initially the weather forecast had promised really crappy weather, so people had made other plans and then changed them last minute.

The forecast promised not just rain all day long, but pouring rain all weekend, and the days before and after. The grounds would have been a morass of mud in that case! But the closer we got to the event itself, the less rain the forecasts contained, and in the end we didn’t get a single drop. It was pretty cold though. We’re not used to 12 degree weather after our week in Mallorca.

Even with the ticket sales stopped, the grounds were absolutely packed. We sat up at the very back like last year, and even up there it was cramped. Luckily we were early and had no trouble finding space for our picnic blankets. But towards the end, we had to pull in our blankets to make space.

After barely two days at home, we’re off again, this time to Estonia. I had initially planned for more rest between the two trips, but due to hotel availability one of them had to be rescheduled, so there we are. If we want to squeeze three trips into a single summer vacation, there isn’t an awful lot of time left over for other things.

Tomorrow we’ll be attending the song festival, so instead of heading straight to Tartu as we usually do, we stay in Tallinn for the weekend. Today we strolled around Tallinn’s old town, which we haven’t done in many years. The town was was full of visitors for the song festival, and plenty of foreign tourists as well. Just like Prague, and Valldemossa. I wonder if central Stockholm is the same.



Tallinn is all about medieval cobbled streets, and churches and towers and walls. We sampled some of each, and even toured defensive tunnels under the walls.

Having been under the earth, we climbed up into Oleviste church tower, which – back in the 16th century – used to be the tallest building in Europe. Or maybe the whole world, I can’t remember for certain.



Lunch at Tallinn’s market hall was a nice surprise. The range of eateries was much wider and more varied than I had dared to hope, and so were the choices of vegetarian food.

Day 7 of 7. Today was a travel day really but we had a late flight so we got to spend half a day in Palma de Mallorca. We left our luggage at the station and just walked around, aiming our steps vaguely towards the old town and the cathedral.

Mostly we were hot. Then we found a museum, I’m not even really sure what its name was but it had things (mostly art) from Mallorca throughout the ages. The particulars weren’t important, the main thing was that the museum was blessedly cool.

Day 6 of 7. Valldemossa to viewpoints and back, 9.3 km.

The only walk option in the trip notes for today was a long and demanding one with a lot of ascent. We didn’t feel up to it so we improvised a walk of our own. From Valldemossa we followed the road down towards the beach, but then turned off the road onto a narrow, steep, twisty path that took us to the top of the cliffs. Up there we followed a nice wide path that took us to several viewpoints. And when we had walked far enough, we walked back the same way.

The clifftop path was mostly flat and straight, and often exposed towards the sea, so it was easy walking. The 9 km was less than we have walked on past trips, but more than we have done in the past few days in the heat. Today it was no effort. I purposely didn’t say anything about the distance to the kids, and they were surprised to hear how much they had walked without it really feeling like that much.

Our hotel here in Valldemossa has no pool. Understandable, given the area: it’s all small, narrow streets packed together on a rocky hill. After we’d had our daily ice cream, we just spent the rest of the afternoon lounging on the shaded terrace and our air conditioned rooms, doing nothing much. We are really looking forward to going back home to more normal weather.

Day 5 of 7. Sóller to Deia, 9 km, 380 m of ascent. Local bus from Deia to Valldemossa.

Those 9 km seemed like a lot to begin with, especially after yesterday’s performance. Would the kids be able to do it at all, in this heat?

Indeed the initial ascent wasn’t much fun. But as soon as we got a bit higher up into the hills, into areas that were open towards the sea, we got a cooling breeze and everyone perked up. The heat is most insufferable when the air doesn’t move and sweat doesn’t evaporate. (This was the first time ever in my life, outside of saunas, when I literally had trickles of sweat running down my body.) Just having some movement in the air, even though that air was no cooler, made a huge difference. After the frying pan feeling of the valley around Sóller, this was quite refreshing. Indeed I thought that if all the days could have felt like this, we could have done a lot more walking this week, even with this heat wave.

In one or two magical spots the wind must have blown through some cave or deep ravine or otherwise been cooled by the rocks somehow. We were hit by a blast of cold air that felt like opening the refrigerator. What a moment of luxury! Ten steps further ahead it was back to normal.

Today Eric and Adrian were entertaining each other with games, while Ingrid put on her headphones. Their game was to go through the alphabet and come up with a [something] for each letter. First it was English first names, A to Z. Then animals, then some other thing.

I liked this “transfer hike” better than the previous one, not just because of the sea breeze. The paths were smoother, the surroundings greener and more varied, and the views more interesting. We passed mansions, high walls and ravines, and of course olive trees and pines.

Valldemossa, our destination for today, is a beautiful place with a lot of history. Unfortunately, as with most such places, it’s been strongly tourist-adapted. On the plus side, the town is incredibly tidy and clean and very pretty to look at. On the minus side, it’s full of tourist cafés and souvenir shops. Being here as a tourist myself, I have no right to complain, even though I kind of want to, anyway.

The oldest parts of Valldemossa are very steep and narrow. Some buildings seem to be built around a large rock outcropping, with the rock literally forming a part of the foundation.

Day 4 of 7, sea views from Port de Sóller, 3 km / 6 km.

Today is Saturday, which is market day in Sóller, so this morning we strolled around the stalls in the town centre and browsed everything from straw hats to strawberries.

The plan was to take a taxi to the harbour and then start walking from there. But the taxis were all busy or something and we gave up after waiting for half an hour, and took the expensive tram again. I saw locals taking the tram for a short hop only; they must have a special tariff or they’d all be ruined by their tram commute.


We had a number of route options for today, but the heat is debilitating. Today was the hottest day yet (the forecast was 37°C) and our enthusiasm for walking in this weather is beginning to run out, so we chose a very short walk. From the harbour we just walked to the lighthouse and back. As we got higher up and closer to the open sea, we got a bit of sea breeze and felt almost invigorated… and then we had to walk back down into the frying pan again.

This was enough for Ingrid, so she and Eric headed back to the hotel. Adrian and I still had some energy left so we rounded the harbour to the other side of the bay, to see the views from there. We were hoping to be able to get far enough to look back to the lighthouse we climbed to. The very tip of the headland was a closed-off military area so we couldn’t get that far, but we got some nice views out towards the sea. This was right out in the open, in the burning sun with no shade, so we admired the view for no more than a minute and then fled down into whatever shade we could find.

Note to self: dinner at Ca’n Pintxo, a modern tapas place just like the one we liked in Fornalutx. El huevo del chef was some kind of egg concoction topped with smoked honey foam: I can’t even really say what it was I ate, but it was delicious.