Picnic by the lake

Listen to little birdie's station

In Tyresta National Park and Nature Reserves near Stockholm, there are several lakes.

Now it's difficult to select only a few pictures, because I took many beautiful ones...

This was the first lake we saw, still on the way to our picnic place:






This one was relatively close to the bus stop and parking lot, but we chose the longer way to another lake, about 4 kilometres away, but it took more than an hour to get there, because of me clicking my little machine all the time... :-)

After I have had only one small sandwich that day and it was already 4 o'clock, a warm day, hiking in also slightly rocky places, it was soooooo wonderful to sit down by the lake, kick off the shoes, tip our feet in the water (now it was fantastic, and not painful cold like here), then have a huge sandwich and some nice salad.

It was just perfect: nice temperature (22 degrees), no noise but birds, wind and water and nobody else around. We even had a little nap: my hubby was sleeping for a whole hour. I woke up earlier and, again, started to click around...





Typical summer clouds:





stockholm

My Midsommar

Listen to little birdie's station

Continuing from here

Midsommar (Midsummer) is The Big Holiday for Swedish people. If you can't see almost anything of the Sun for months, it's very well understandable that you will be extremely happy about the days when it is light all day. Here in Stockholm, around the longest day of the year we have 5.5 hours only when the Sun is not up. In the North, it's even more so: the Sun doesn't even go down at all.

Well, lets don't talk about how difficult is to sleep when it is as light as on these pictures, let's just enjoy the summer!

Last year I had a few photos of how people celebrate it when they get together in the community.

Other than this singing & dancing together, it's garden party time: the people disappear from the city and go out to their summer houses for the weekend. So did we on friday: got together with my husband's family and a few friends.

And a dog one of the couples was sitting for a few days, which brought some excitement and funny moments into the not-too-actionful day.

Nice food: a lot of fish, mostly herring prepared in different ways, potatoes, a little grilling and rhebarb in delicious hot zinnamon sauce. The only point was that I couldn't really enjoy the vanilla ice cream that went with it, because I was anyway freezing like hell...

In the middle of summer, around 13 degrees, sitting still for long hours... Brrrrr! Luckily, my husband's jacket was big enough to put on top of my outdoor jacket...

But yesterday it was very nice weather, so we made it up for freezing before.

Me & my Honey had a little trip to Tyresta which is a wonderful national park and nature reserves area. Just outside of Stockholm, so if you follow the Journey planner link on their website, you can easily go there with public transport (type in "Tyresta by" in the "to" field).

It is definitely worth for a trip!

We started with walking in a beautiful primeval forest which is unique: they don't cultivate it but it is left in it's natural state, representing a typical Middle Sweden forest. So you can see dead trees and such pretty often.

A few shots, on the way to our picnic place: