Tampere - Huittinen kayak trip, June 2009

Second to last leg of our kayak tour of the lakes of western Finland. It rained for most of the 81 km:s but all in all it was a interesting trip.

Click here to see the first part (2007) and here to see the second part (2008).

Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage, March 2009

The 1000 year old pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is known in English as the Way of St. James and in Galician as the Camino de Santiago. Each year, over 100,000 pilgrims from all over the world travel to Spain to walk the Camino, or part of it.

We walked the first half of the journey (St. Jean de Pied Port - Léon) about 470km in March 2009, during off- season. The second part, 380km, is planned for October.

Landscape Panoramas from Ruka, Northern Finland, February 2009

We've been experimenting with stitching pictures together to create panoramas. Here are a couple of great landscape panoramas from the Ruka ski center in finnish Lapland.

They were taken with a simple Canon point-and shoot (A570IS) camera, but the results came out better than expected. You should really view them in slideshow mode to make them justice.

IOM European Championships, November 2008

Eero L. (FIN-45) and myself (FIN-41) had the pleasure to represent Finland. We travelled to Croatia by car, the nonstop journey from Vasa to Dubrovnik took 3 days.
We had pleasant mediterranean weather, 20-25 degrees and mild winds, the kind of weather we have in Finland during summer months. The tide, on the other hand, was a new fenomena for us northerners.

Croatians really worked hard for the event and as You can see from the results, they are very good sailors too. On the way home we made detours to Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany and Sweden.

Saint Henry's pilgrimage, September 2008

St Henry, the patron saint of Finland, was an Englishman who became appointed bishop of Uppsala in Sweden — or, according to other sources, as a missionsbishop. In 1155 he accompanied the Swedish king on a crusade to Finland and stayed on to do missionary work until he came to a violent end on ice-covered Lake Köyliö in 1156.

According to a legend his bones were first brought to Nousiainen and later in 1300 moved to the newly consecrated Turku Cathedral. In the Middle Ages the road from Köyliö to Nousiainen and further to Turku was known as St Henry's road and became a popular route for pilgrimages.