New start

Today, my 91-year old mother, newly widowed, moves to a new care home in a new town.  She's blind and her hearing is going.  Is she brave!

Helsinki

Four tranquil days by the sea, even on the sea too, sailing round the islands, like Isosaari we spent this week.  'Iso' is the Finnish for 'big and once I lived on Big Robert's Street - Isorobertinkatu.  'Katu', the Finnish equivalent of the Swedish word 'Gatu', means gate or street.
Daughter and I wandered the streets of Helsinki
and the market

Red cathedral, Helsinki

and the cathedrals, red and white.
We had a lovely evening meal with a Sibelius concert - we should have stayed there longer.

Finland is full of trees, pine trees and delicate silver birch trees. And water seems to make up half its land in lakes, not rivers.  In the fields of Suomenalinnea (an island off Helsinki where the Russians built a Finnish fortress - the Gibraltar of the North), we saw no cows or sheep or signs of rabbits, though I noticed that several Helsinki women walked poodles or dogs that looked a bit like poodles.  The streets were clean and clear, and pavements were wide for pedestrians and separate tracks for cyclists.


We ate reindeer meat, and berries - lingonberries and something like blue berries that were very palatable.
The ligon berries were however so tart that your cheeks watered.  I found a use for them by mixing them in with the butter-fired mushrooms I cooked in the evenings at the YHA hostel.
In the hostel, we met the usual friendly sort of foreigners.  An Indian couple from Ahmedabad advised me to visit again, and a very English gentleman with bottle-bottom thick spectacles introduced himself with "how do you do?"  After the usual pleasantries about where we came from he started a long story about how he came to lose his driving licence, a story that entailed him drawing my attention to the braces that held up his yellow knee length dungarees that he'd made for himself so he could attach his wooden leg more easily. Eccentric?

Eurokangas fabric store

Helsinki train station

Daughter found the most magnificently well stocked fabric shop and had a whale of a time examining various cloths to turn into coats, capes and costumes.

Damp Devon

Each year for some seven or eight years, husband and I have taken two or three grandchildren youth hostelling.  This year we aimed to do it again, but this time two parents came with us, and my daughter. This year the company made up for the rainy weather.
We visited SS Great Britain in Bristol on the way down there, the most fascinating old ship I've been on.  I've been on older ships (in Stockholm and in Portsmouth) but this one related to relatives that I could imagine in the 19th century who might have travelled to Australia on such a ship. Its engineering is amazing.  How did they work out the maths to create those structures?  They must have applied calculus and had the machinery to create the propellor and the bows.
On the Monday,  thought we'd hide from the rain by investigating the hidden underground passages of Exeter.  Unfortunately too many others had had the same idea and it was fully booked.  So we paddled around,saw the outside of the cathedral, picked some blackberries at the park and ride car park and went to see my revered first mother-in-law.
Later in the week some of us walked up Dunkery Beacon, and we visited Dunster Mill and went round  Dunster Castle, which was probably the most exciting event of the break - husband left his brolly there.  Yes we needed umbrellas all week.