Geonewts, Particle Accelerators and Boat Squats
Last week I spent two more or less beautiful summer evenings looking for geocaches and just enjoying cycling around the Helsinki area. It was nice to notice the five hours straight cycling on both streets and off road, climbing trees and clambering up cliffsides didn’t make me terribly tired in the end. Apparently the plan of “exercise by accident by diving and caching” is starting to work.
I took a bunch of photos, which can be found in my Flickr gallery, but here’s a couple of examples.
On the first day I went looking for a geocache next to a particle accelerator lab in a thunderstorm. Yeah, no superpowers and not even a small tear in the fabric of time and space – what a disappointment. My plan of getting superpowers by hanging around particle accelerator seems not to work. This is the second time I tried something like this. The first time was me getting a splinter of wood in my finger in the radioactive material storage room of another particle accelerator.
The photos is taken with iPhone camera, which tries to process the photos somehow on the fly. If you move the camera while taking the pics, funky results ensue. When I SMS’d my pals about what I was doing Ville asked me for photos of the last moments in this reality. This is what he got.
Didn’t find the cache. Found a newt instead.
The next day, which was sunny. The Kulosaari church area is ridiculously beautiful, especially on a clear weather like that.
The weird houseboat I found last year.
A detail on the wharf.
Rainbows, Kittens, Spiders and Bovines
Last weekend was the first in a long long time I got to spend at the cabin almost by myself. The Friday was full of irritating hassle, which included getting our old big ass table from the house Susi, Jori, Riikka and I had been living earlier. The table was over two meters long and made of proper wood, so it was both heavy and unwieldy. I ended up calling a cab for it, which I had the pleasure of waiting for outside in a steadily worsening thunderstorm. As soon as I got it loaded up and heading for the downtown, I was off for the countryside myself.
The trip itself was very much suitable to end a week of grumpiness. The thunder was rolling, the lightning flashed, the heavy rain hit the windshield like a torrent of gravel and the soundtrack was Viikate played loud enough.
At the cabin site I holed up in the smaller cabin and got out my novel project, which has been on a writers’ blockish hiatus for a year or so. Surrounded by the gray light of a late evening, the patter of rain and a blessful absence of all distractions I got the text flowing again.
The next couple of days I spent rowing on the lake, photographing the nature, searching for geocaches, eating and saunaing. Susi arrived at the cabin site on Saturday, probably lured by the four month old kitten that Susi’s mother had got. I like other peoples’ kids and cats, and the kitten made me go into a kitty psychosis, which manifests as babbling inanely and being unable not to pet & play with the kitty even though you are bloody allergic to it.
Someone else's kids and cats rock, and someone else's four month old kittens rock even more!
I started the Saturday by retrieving a geocache I had placed on a rock wall in one of the islands in the lake. The cache had been found floating on the shoreline a couple of islands away by some girl scouts. Luckily their scout leader happened to be an avid geocacher, who had logged my cache in the wintertime and remembered it. It’s improbable that the cache had fallen out by itself, so either it was crows or magpies, or some moron with an IQ of a bird. I guess we’ll see how long the cache stays up this time.
In the evening there was a massive rain storm with the most impressive rainbow I’ve ever seen. The wind blew the storm over the lake, with the sun still painting the treeline on the opposing shore and islands golden yellow. You could see the rain front advancing and churning the lake into dark greenish gray. The incoming wind carried raindrops with it and almost pushed me down from my unsteady perch on the shoreline rocks. Then, a massively bright double rainbow going from one end of the cabin bay to another.
There was a sudden rain storm that blew over the lake. You could see the lake surface turning dark grayish green as the wall of rain came in. The wind pushed the rain ahead of it and churned the tops of the waves white. Then, a massively bright double rainbow.
I spent a big part of the Sunday looking for a couple of geocaches. The day was mostly sunny and swelteringly hot and humid. There was a constant rumble of thunder and dark clouds here and there in the horizon. I love that kind of weather when I’m out in the countryside. The combination of sunshine and distant thunder makes the world glow, it stops the clocks and makes everything around you hyper focused, alive, active and beautiful.
The first cache was next to a radio beacon used by aircrafts, but the second one got quite interesting. It was in a small grove in middle of a large field where cows were grazing. The grove was reserved for flying squirrels, but apparently the bovines used it as a shade from the sun. I trekked over other peoples’ orchards and fields, copses and barbed wire fences, until I reached the GPS zero point – which was full of young bulls.
When I found the GPS location for the cache, I had company. Company, who was very curious about what I was doing and lacked all sense of personal space.
Well, I think they were young bulls, but I didn’t lift any tails to check it out conclusively. The thing is that the bovines were friendly, curious and had no sense of personal place. I wasn’t sure how safe crouching around teenage oxen would be, plus there were only so many friendly cow noses and tongues you could deal with, so I decided to come back later and try again.
Umm, that's close enough with the nose, thank you.
Personal bubble, personal bubble!
On my way back I alleviated my disappontment by gorging on wild raspberries, that are ridiculously abundant this year.
I had to give up with trying to find the cache, since there's only so much bovine attention you can take. I comforted myself with raspberries, which were - to put it mildly - abundant this year.
In spite of certain unfortunate hassles I had to deal with, and which trashed certain other plans for Saturday, this weekend was just what the doctor ordered. Peace, quiet and nature. And, also, too much food and A KITTY!
Susi with the kitty scarf.
Short Geotrip and a Camera Test Drive
During the midsummer weekend I made the mistake of pointing my trusty Sony Cybershot DSC-W30 directly at Jori’s face, which of course broke the damn camera. This was a crying shame, because I had really liked the camera, which I’ve used on all of my UE-trips and other adventures. It’s been durable, fast, easy to use, low on noise in bad lighting conditions and overall the best impulse buy I’ve ever done on the gadget front.
I replaced the trusty workhorse with a Fuji FinePix F200EXR which Jaana-Mari recommended to me and took it out on a testdrive on a short geocaching trip after work. I went searching for a couple of new caches and revisiting two of my nemesis caches, which I’ve been trying to find 7-12 times so far, with no luck.
The full Flickr photoset, with samples below.
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