Mandatory rural trips

A week ago I came back to the city from a couple of mandatory summer cottage / rural Finland excursions. The first one took us to Pori, a smallish city on the western coast of Finland, couple of hours north of Turku. A couple items of note here: first, the city is showing a good example through their use of renewable energy sources, namely wind. Even if there are only a few of these modern windmills, it’s a start. You’ll see from the photo that that is a human there for size comparison.

Another thing are creatures called frogs. A frog here is not a slimy jumpy thing but a delicious, sweet – and smiling – thing as can be seen from the photo on the right. One is great, two would probably kill you with all the sugar and sweetness they have in it. Pori is also the home to the only real beach in the entire Finland (I kid you not), Yyteri. Too bad it’s so far away from Helsinki, as this is one of the two places in Finland that ever get surfable waves.

The second excursion was a few days in the Turku archipelago, an exquisitely beautiful area of the Baltic sea, dotted with thousands and thousands of islands. The islands, of course, block two of my favorite things about the sea – the horizon and the waves – but it’s still nice. So what is there to do on an island? Well, as evidenced by the photos below, one can admire absolutely terrific sunsets, enjoy a perfect summer day on the beach reading a good novel or something, watch the sky with great interest as a big evil cloud is about to devour an innocent small cloud and visit quaint small villages on other islands. And so on.

So does summer get any better than this? It does, in fact – by returning home. More on that a bit later.