The Six Day Trip

I just came back from a quick tour up North! Solo time - a time for true contemplation and peace but also quite extensive and intense garden plotting and shovel-turning that left me totally sapped of energy the last day - despite consistent and heavy vitamin-rich pine sprout chewing.

I really tried to do things, but ended up just hanging in my old one-floor tree house (no roof), lounging in the sun, singing songs to the birds; unable to get any real work done until my inevitable leave... and now I'm back.

I had to get up 4:55 to hitch a ride (thanks again Andreas!) to the bus, to the bus to the airport, to the plane that was initially an hour and a half delayed - but flew in roughly half of that time, and then take the bus to the train straight to work to the train back home to a postponed Mother's Day celebration (it was the 27th - I called then, but here I brought the gifts and card) and with that I just want to say: I'm tired, so I've decided to throw up a quick dose of pictures and let them speak for the trip. Basically it was...

...but with a lot of sun I amazingly managed to never catch on camera. Except in that last one... when it was receding behind the trees.

Actually these pictures don't sum up my stay properly at all.

I did so much more! I took a swim in the icy floodwater. I soaked in the sauna every day. I sat by the fireplace. I fixed the bikes and biked to our nearest neighbor a few kilometers away - collecting leftover delineators and putting up the mailbox on the way. I pulled up water from the well by hand until I learned how to prepare the pump, and washed some clothes to clear the water for drinking, and brought out all the water barrels and benches and ladders and furniture and stuff, fried up scrambled eggs with onions and cream for lunch and dinner - or canned mackerel and kale, and cleared the chimney after a first freezing night in a dusty room (arrived after midnight) - and on that note cleaned up the house a bit, and oiled in old machinery, cut the grass, knocked up the raspberry (that's seriously what Google Translate tells me tying plants to wooden poles with suitable lengths of string is called in English), trimmed the black current patch, fixed the fence, cleared the greenhouse, turned half the garden plot (that's what rendered me totally devoid of energy on the last day), planted a couple of rows and a few growth-boosting boxes in the greenhouse, and meditated in the simmering spring sun during sessions of well-deserved rest.

I (hopefully) fended off a horse ant invasion too. They came out of nowhere the second to last day - usually they're much later. Unfortunately for them they love old wooden houses too - but like to eat them before they live in them - so we don't treat them kindly.

Overall it's been a blast, tiring yet inspiring, and the next trip - the big one - waits just over a month away. After a quick weekend tour to a place I've never been this coming weekend...

Maybe I'll have some badly selected, taken and collected, pictures to show then too.

Also this was really more like five days and two nights, and the first and final ones were somewhat sleepless - but all in all six days is what it makes. Daisies what if waits.