Last weekend we had an urge to go outside and barbecue some sausage. If Finnish people have one thing to take to an outdoor trip it’s the sausage, or makkara as we called it! Almost everyone (not my sister-she insisted of adding this) who has intention to eat something on one day hike carries sausages in there pack bag.
So we chose a national park that’s an hour away from our house, the Kauhaneva-Pohjankangas. For us it is easy to reach by car, but would need more planning if using public transportation. It’s a small park, consisting mainly of wetlands. There’s is a four kilometer long nature path that goes through the wetlands and it makes a round trip. We left our car at the Salomaa parking place which is one of the two places you can start the path. We walked to the other end of it, a place called Nummikangas (it’s the other place to start your walk). In both of these places there is a fireplace and toilet. At Nummikangas there is also a bird watching tower that has a nice view over the national park.
We decided to have our lunch at Nummikangas so we made a fire there. The air was foggy but cold (about -8) when we came but during our break sun started to shine. After our lunch we didn’t return to the marked path but we walked around the frozen wetlands back to our car. There was only about 10 centimeters of snow so it was easy and peaceful to walk a little side from the actual path, if you don’t count your own child running around at snow. We just kept our eye were the path goes so we would stay on track on our whereabouts. It wasn’t that cold day but humidity of air made sure that even our black dog had white big beard after few hours of outing. M.
We were driving back from northern Lapland in end of July. It was a hot summer day and the temperature had prevented us from taking our dog for a long walk during the day. We took a map and searched for any nice new, unseen paths nearby. We found one in Iivaara. It was a nice few kilometer hike on the top on the forested hill and even though a bit far from the main road, it was not too far from our route.
Our way down was much faster than way up. If you have an 11 year old boy and a young large breed dog, which both have spend a lot of time in the car, you can imagine. M.
At the first day we also walked through a ridge with lake on both sides. Since every one of us was a rookie to hiking for long distance, we made some silly mistakes that we have been able to laugh many times after that. The first one happened in the first night when we build our tent to this beautiful sandy beach of a tiny pond. It looked so soft and even place to sleep at we were really happy about our choice of place. Well, during the night it started raining… And in the morning the sand, that had got slightly wet, got stuck everywhere. I had also got my sleeping bag wet somehow during the first day when it had rained a little bit. Unfortunately I didn’t notice that until everyone else was sleeping so I was freezing the whole night. Although the first morning was rough with sand everywhere, we were all really excited to start the hike and reach the Kevo canyon soon.
Our second day was windy and full of little showers. Then we discovered a little failure in our equipment. On that summer we saw lot of advertisement of these rain ponchos that were kind of a hit thing back then. So we inexperienced hikers thought that here is a thing for us and it was also a bargain. After that day we all just wanted to burn our ponchos in a big fire or bury them and dance on their graves! The wind blew on the inside of the poncho so no matter how you stuff it in under your backpack it just slithered its way out and flap around you preventing you from seeing, hearing and most definitely from staying dry. It was so comical that we can still remember us finally just laughing desperately to our rain covers in the rain.
Finland with small steps 