Day 3 of 7. Sóller to Port de Sóller, 5 km, mostly flat.


Sóller is a much bigger town than Fornalutx and a large part of our walk today was relatively urban compared to previous days. We walked along small streets and lanes, and past gardens and orange orchards.

The port of Sóller was a touristy place. It had a nice harbour and pretty views of the Mediterranean, but the town mostly consisted of a long row of waterfront restaurants, and shops selling souvenirs and bathing suits. I didn’t find it particularly interesting or appealing.

We didn’t really feel up to walking those 5 km twice, so we took the tram back. Picturesque and interesting, and beats walking – but at 7 EUR per person it felt rather expensive.

Apparently the rolling stock was originally imported from San Francisco and it’s been running here for a hundred years. Clearly these trams have some kind of dispensation from modern safety rules: some of the cars are completely open on the sides, and the platforms likewise. The seats were all taken when we got on so we stood on the platforms. People a hundred years ago must have been much slimmer, or perhaps just more willing to sit closer to each other than today’s travellers: seats made for 2 were not nearly wide enough for two people.

Speaking of narrow things: the sidewalks, where they exist at all, are really, really narrow. The streets are as they are, because the buildings are where they are. And cars aren’t going to get any narrower. So pedestrians adjust. In places, there’s barely room to walk in single file. Mostly car drivers were quite considerate, but a few obviously needed to assert their dominance by passing rather too close and too fast, which got quite scary at times. Luckily there weren’t many such streets in the town centre – most were fully pedestrian-friendly.


I wasn’t previously aware that the main language on Mallorca is Catalan; in my ignorance I was expecting Spanish. Not that it makes much of a difference – I don’t speak either language, and understanding written Catalan is no more difficult than doing the same with Spanish. Perhaps even easier, since Catalan is more similar to French, which I do speak.

I found intriguing signs of a past when things were different: old street signs in Spanish, now replaced by new ones in Catalan. I really liked the tile signs.

Day 2 of 7. Fornalutx to Sóller. 8 km, 350 m of ascent. Which would be a piece of cake for all of us if it wasn’t for the heat.

We set off along the pretty, flower-adorned, cobbled streets of Fornalutx. But our route started ascending before we had even left the town, and that ascent then continued for three and a half kilometres with nearly no breaks. We were, frankly, suffering most of that time.


Finally we reached the viewpoint at Mirador de ses Barques and were rewarded by views all the way down to Port de Sóller. At the café we got some rest, and ice cream and refreshing drinks.

Here the relentless ascent ended and we now mostly walked downhill. The weather was no cooler, but not having to push uphill all the time made a huge difference.

The kids complained about the heat a bit but I got the impression that it didn’t bother them as much as me and Eric, it was more just something to complain about. Their real problem was boredom. Now they started playing “20 questions” with animals to pass the time. Soon they were fairly skipping along, walking ahead of us to the next point in our route description (“in 150 metres, pass an old gateway” or “when the path crosses a trail, keep going straight ahead”) and waiting for us to catch up.


The paths and trails were sometimes cobbled but often quite stony and uneven. I had to keep my eyes down in front of my feet much of the time, so I couldn’t look around as much as I would have liked. But that was perhaps not a huge loss – the surroundings today were less varied than yesterday. Mostly lots of stone walls and gnarly olive trees and dusty, brown ground.

Thoughts of air conditioned hotel rooms and a dip in the hotel pool kept us going, and we were justly rewarded upon our arrival.

Day 1 of 7. Circular walk around Fornalutx via Binibassi and Biniaraix, 6 km.

The heat wave is here and the heat is incredible. Stepping outside the hotel feels like stepping into an oven. But we’re here to walk and there isn’t much else to do in this little village, and spending all day in the hotel is not our idea of fun. So we walked, taking it slow and drinking lots of water.

Walking soon became an exercise in seeking shade. Whenever the path zig-zagged, we crossed it to walk on the shadier side. If we wanted to stop a sip of water, the first step was to find a tree that was large and dense enough to provide proper shade. Standing still for even a minute in the burning heat was too much.

Luckily there were quite a lot of trees, and the path was often bordered by high stone walls, which gave even better shade. This old washhouse was very pleasantly cool.

The orange and lemon trees were so full of fruit they looked like they were from a picture book. We found some lemons that had fallen into the street and ate one; it was delicious. It was strange to eat a warm lemon though: we do eat quite a lot of the fruits at home at room temperature, but I only use lemons for cooking and keep them in the fridge so in my head lemons are always cold.

It was interesting to see the trees so well adapted to the dry climate: they all manage to keep their leaves and fruit, while the ground is dry dust and the grasses have all withered and died.

We’re staying (for two nights) at a lovely little hotel, Petit Hotel Fornalutx. It has a terrace and a garden, and even more importantly, a swimming pool.

We spent most of the afternoon in and around the pool. Ingrid and Adrian swam and splashed; Eric and I sat in the shade and cooled our feet in the pool.

Note to self: the restaurant Molón is very nice. Tapas and small dishes to be shared, but of a modern kind, which meant many more meat-free and vegetarian options than in all the traditional Mallorcan restaurants we passed.

On our way to Mallorca for a week of hiking.

This year we let someone else do the planning for us and bought a ready-made package. Our seven nights in Mallorca are spread over three different towns, so some days we walk from one place to another, and other days we stay put and just walk around.

Unfortunately our trip coincides with what threatens to be the worst heat wave in Europe in living memory, so it remains to be seen how much actual walking we will be able to do. The current forecast is for temperatures over 35°C.

Today we flew back from Prague. But the flight for Stockholm didn’t leave until mid-afternoon, so I had a whole free morning to spend in Prague.

I considered the Alphonse Mucha museum, which was just a stone’s throw from our hotel, but wasn’t in the mood for Mucha. Instead I visited the Jewish sights of Prague. The synagogues, just like the churches, all charged for entrance, but at least here I could pay once and get a single ticket for all the sights.

The old Jewish cemetery was beautiful but also sad in its abandonment, in a way that I haven’t felt about any other cemetery I’ve been to.

The Pinkas Synagogue, a memorial to the tens of thousands of Jews from Czechoslovakia who were killed in the Holocaust, was serene and peaceful but even sadder.

The Spanish Synagogue on the other hand was strikingly beautiful, and if I hadn’t had a flight to catch, I would have stayed there a lot longer.

Today was a sightseeing day in Prague. First we all went on a boat cruise together, up and down the Vltava. The afternoon was free time, which I spent together with some other 1337 ninjas walking around the city centre, visiting the castle and cathedral and other such obvious sights.

The boat trip was not particularly exciting. There was no guide to tell us anything about what we saw. And the Vltava is so wide that you don’t really get a very good view of the city this way. The clear highlight of the cruise was a yachting event that we passed. Half a dozen little yachts were going up and down the river between colourful buoys. The wind was brisk to say the least, and they were going at great speed, very close to each other. There were several near crashes and we saw one sailor go overboard. Compared to this, the rest of the trip was bland.

The city was chock full of tourists, especially Chinese ones. Literally busload after busload of them, everywhere. I was going to go see the old town square and the old astronomical clock but the square and even the streets leading to it were so full that I gave up before getting there, and turned away and walked in another direction. The Charles bridge likewise could barely be seen between all the selfie-takers and souvenir vendors.

The city has adapted to the tourists and their preferences more than I would wish. Every single place charges an entrance fee – even churches! I like churches and when I am in a strange city I like to look into them, both the splendid cathedrals and the small, simple back street churches. Here, I couldn’t do that, because paying for every single one would get expensive fast. In the St. Vitus cathedral, where I peeked in but decided against paying, visitors couldn’t even walk around freely – there was a narrow path that you had to follow, at the same pace as everyone before and after you, which rather takes away the whole point of visiting a church.

Instead I admired it from the outside. And as an added bonus, a choir was visiting the cathedral square at the same time and sang beautifully – mostly for themselves, I guess, but since they were outside and not behind an entrance fee, the rest of us could also enjoy it.

All of the city centre is full of dozens of soulless shops hoping to sell luxury brands to the Chinese. And every café and street vendor sells identical trdelník cakes, which have no flavour and no obvious redeeming qualities. They’ve obviously been cooked up for tourists only, because they definitely aren’t traditional to Czechia – I never saw anything like them during my previous two trips to Prague.

Once you get away from the most famous parts of the city, it is nice. But on the whole, it wasn’t what I had hoped for or what it used to be.

This was a very busy day with talks and presentations and workshops and so on, and I barely remembered I owned a camera, which is a pity. This is the only photo I have from today – from my walk back to the hotel after dinner.

My own presentation was very well received and – if you’ll excuse me for boasting – I’ve already been asked if I can do it again for other audiences.

For the technically minded among you, the title of my session was “Fumbling towards multi-tenancy” and I talked about how we took the application that I’m currently working with from “what’s a tenant” to multi-tenancy. I spoke about the choice between multi-instance and multi-tenant apps, and then multi-database vs shared database for the data layer. And some technical details about implementing our chosen path (multi-tenant with a shared database) using .NET Core and Entity Framework: query filters, defensive saving and row-level security.

I flew to London for a concert. Which felt incredibly wasteful and decadent, but Dead Can Dance is one of a very few bands about which I have thought for years that one day I would want to see them perform live.

The concert was good but not excellent; the sound level of course ridiculous as ever (earplugs ftw). I’m glad I went to see and hear them, but I don’t feel any need to do it again.

I had several hours of free time before the concert. After I had picked up my tickets at the Hammersmith Apollo, I googled for “walks in Hammersmith”, remembering all the pleasant, well-planned and well-documented walks Eric and I used to do in London and elsewhere in the UK.

And the Internet delivered – or rather, the Inner London Ramblers did. Their web site described a nice-sounding circular walk in Hammersmith, of a very suitable length, passing almost exactly where I was. So I spent two hours rambling in Hammersmith, Barnes and Chiswick – along the Thames, the Leg o’ Mutton reservoir, Chiswick gardens and then small lanes in Hammersmith. It was utterly lovely and I realized just how much I sometimes miss London.

London has something that Stockholm doesn’t. Stockholm is tidy and well-ordered and straight; London is quirky and scruffy and full of character. It’s quirky in an unselfconscious way, without even trying. Much of it is due to age. London lets old things be, whereas Stockholm straightens them out and replaces and upgrades. London has little crooked lanes and rusty old iron fences and crumbling stone. Stockholm has straight cycle paths and

There are benefits to the Stockholm approach, of course: nearly everything in Stockholm is accessible for wheelchairs and pushchairs, for example, while London still marks specific Tube stations as accessible – and most aren’t. But as a visitor with two working legs and no pram to push, oh I do love London so much.

Stuck at Finse, 0 km.

Today’s weather was no better than yesterday’s. We didn’t do any skiing, and in fact I didn’t even step outside the building.

Picnic lunch in the hut. Boredom. Book, crocheting, card game, round and round again.

Geiterygghytta to Finse, 19 km.

The weather forecast for this day was unpleasant, with high winds all day – 13 m/s on average, and 20 m/s higher up on the ridges and passes. That’s not the kind of weather in which one would normally choose to go out skiing in the mountains. But we do have to get out of here somehow… We have a spare day planned in Finse, so we could wait a day, but tomorrow’s weather is supposed to be even worse. Today should be dry; tomorrow will be as windy as today but with added precipitation. So off we went.

The wind hit us straight in our faces the moment we left the hut. From then on we had wind all the time, from all directions. It was gusting hard enough to knock us over – at one point we were falling like bowling pins, one person after the other. You stop, bracing hard on the ski poles to stay upright, and then you fall anyway because the wind suddenly stops. At times the wind was almost pushing me backwards, uphill.

After an hour, the group leader checked in with us. “All good, guys? Ready for five more hours of this?” And at that point it didn’t feel too bad.

But shortly after this point it started snowing after all: sometimes wet, sleety snow, sometimes stinging, icy needles. Visibility got worse and worse. We could just see the next few twigs marking the trail, but not more than that. The snow and wind together were very disorienting. Much of the time I wasn’t even quite sure whether I was going down or up. One moment I’d think I’m skiing on flat ground and then I’d suddenly realize that it’s feeling a bit too easy, so I guess I’m going downhill then?

With the wind’s force behind the wet snow, everything I was wearing got soaked. My ski boots were literally sloshing, my mittens waterlogged and heavy. Water wicked in through the ends of my sleeves. Wool socks and mittens still kept my toes and fingers warm, though.

It wasn’t particularly cold – the temperature must have been around 0°C – but the wind chill was ferocious. For the first time this week I was wearing four layers: wool top, fleece jacket, down jacket, and waterproof jacket. I didn’t think I was cold, but I must have been, because by the afternoon I was shaking and shivering as soon as I stopped moving.

On top of everything, we took the wrong, longer route to Finse due to confusing signage. Landmarks we saw did not make sense when we tried to match them up with the map. When we thought we should be halfway, we were not even near.

The gale-force wind never relented. Every step was a struggle. Lift ski, put it down. Lift the other ski, put it down. Just keep moving. There was no chance to even stop for food, so I was running really low on energy. But I couldn’t have taken my mittens off for long enough to get a snack out of my bag, and I couldn’t have stood still for long enough to eat one.

And so I was utterly exhausted. My mind was going numb and the day was blurring together. How many hours had I been skiing? No idea. How much time had passed since that last descent? No idea. How much further to go? No idea.

I remember thinking to myself – this is how people die in the mountains. It’s not very cold, and we’re right on the path, we’re not hurt or lost or anything like that – but this is how people die. If I hadn’t been with a group, I can imagine how incredibly tempting it might have been to just sit down and rest for a while. But now all I could think was that I couldn’t slow the group down, so I had to keep moving.

The blizzard in Jotunheimen was challenging but even during its peak I was dry and warm and felt safe, so I could enjoy myself. It was an adventure. Today was something else. I hope I never have a skiing day like this again, ever.

Somehow we all made it to Finse. When the first of us got to the village, we didn’t know the way to the hut and huddled in the lee of a house, waiting for the rest of the group. Some local guy went past and wanted our help lifting something or other onto his snowmobile, and we were confusedly milling around, and couldn’t even think straight long enough to say no, and ask him for directions instead.

Finally we found the DNT hut and were met outside the hut by two members from our group who had arrived the day before, by bus. They helped us all get inside, get rid of our skis and packs, and led us straight into a large drying room. After a brief detour to the shower room where I could exchange my soaked clothes for dry things, I simply sat down on the wonderful heated floor in the drying room and stayed there. And at 5 o’clock in the afternoon finally ate my lunch. Then I wrung out my mittens and socks. I didn’t quite have water pouring out of my boots but it took over a day for them to dry all the way.

I borrowed two extra layers of wool before I felt that I could leave the room, and then wrapped myself in a blanket as well. I guess I must have been quite chilled after all. (One guy in our group ended up hypothermic and was almost carried down the last bit of the way.)

It took us 7.5 hours to ski today’s 19 kilometers.

I have no photos from today. Instead, enjoy this photo of a door decoration from Geiterygghytta.