Smell of green grass

What could be better than smell of green grass? Or walking outside on shorts, just having sandals instead of gore-tex boots? Having the sun over you - the sun, which is warming, not just giving light?

Quite excatly one month ago we left from our cold island and met a real summer in the mainland. We celebrated the biggest happening in the summer time, the Midsummer festival, in our neighbour country, Finland.

It was really nice to be just walking around - without a rifle, seeing all the greeness and flowers around and listen different birds singing. Finnish country side is really beautiful in the middle of the summer.

We were overnighting couple of nights in a cabin, nicely hidden in a small forest beside a waterside. And as we were in Finland, having a refreshing sauna every single possible evening.

Nights in the middle of the summer are light without dark time in North, just as they should. The darkness in the summer has always been a strange thing to me. Warm weather and darkness in the same time isn't fitting each other in my dream world.

We were really enjoying our little holiday in the North. Weather was just nice and we enjoyed summerdays with over 25 centigrades. That was totally enough for us! We were having it just fine on those temperatures, but it was worse for our black coated companion. The best thing he could do for to cool down was to swim - and that he was doing as often as it just was possible!

Since we're used to see just white bears around in Svalbard, we went and had a visit in a place to see brown bears.

Even though sign was just in the native language, the pictures was clear enough to  warn, that we needed to keep distance to the bears.

4000 km

We had once more a trip to the mainland. In this time we rented a car in Tromsø and then we were having free amount of kilometres on our use. It might suddenly sounds like three weeks would be plenty of time to do whatever, but we found out that we didn't have time to reach everything we would have liked to.

We rented a Toyota Rav4 which was actually pretty nice car to be driving on Nordic curly and partly mountainous roads.

Here is a proof we have been under the Polar Circle.

Our furry companion was travelling in his cage and he was totally happy with that. He thinks his cage is a cosy and safe place to be. I think it's safest when everybody in the car is having their own safety belt. 

Autumn is actually pretty nice time to be travelling. I really enjoy to see all of those different colours in nature.

Wonderland of winter

One of the best thing in Svalbard is winter. And when it's lacking, I think it's a good enough reason to get desperate. After rainy winter and couple of weeks in mild weather I had got enough and decided to take a holiday immediately. I just needed to get a real winter!

I took our dog with me and flew to the wonderland of winter. We spend couple of weeks in mainland enjoying the best winter weather what anybody could wish. It's actually extremely nice to be skiing without having a rifle with you!