Two and a half weeks in Eastern Finland

I spent two and a half weeks in Eastern Finland, in the municipality of Rautavaara in the region of Northern Savonia, in August and in September. It’s my boyfriend’s home region and I was travelling with him and our two cats. His family has an old house there in Rautavaara, no one lives in the house anymore, it’s just for summertime visits nowadays, and that’s the place we stayed as well. It’s always about an eight hour’s drive from our home to Rautavaara, and the same back of course. – Always worth the travel.

I didn’t take pictures of, like, everything, but naturally I did ‘get caught up in some things’, and the result is this blog post here now. 🙂 I also took some pictures for our, mine and Owlnature‘s, Instagram (owlnatureleena), and the real Instagram widget has, by the way, (finally :p ) been on the sidebar of my blog for some time now as well.

lake Keyritty

By the lake Keyritty, just outside the centre of Rautavaara. It was a summery day. So calm, beautiful… just stunning! And it was completely silent here and everywhere we went. 🙂

lake Keyritty

dragonfly

There were many dragonflies flying and enjoying the sunshine by the house on many days. Here’s two of them.

dragonfly

Tiilikanselkä

By another lake on some other day. This is called Tiilikanselkä.

There are actual creeks in the forest, I’m not sure if this is one of them, or is this just some ditch…? Beautiful water areas in the forests, too, anyway.

monkshood in forest

I went mushroom hunting and all I could find was poisonous monkshood. ;p In this one forest I found monkshood in the wild for the first time.

monkshood in forest

monkshood in forest

boletus edulis, penny bun

But we did find a lot of mushrooms, too, during our trip. Here’s one penny bun mushroom or cep or porcino/porcini or boletus edulis mushroom…

craterellus (or cantharellus) tubaeformis, yellowfoot, winter mushroom

And here’s our biggest amount of yellowfoot mushrooms or winter mushrooms or funnel chanterelles or cantharellus/craterellus tubaeformis mushrooms…

In addition to cooking with mushrooms we enjoyed bilberries (or blueberries), lingonberries and crowberries in the forests.

Another lake again. I was on a ridge. There are lakes on either side of the ridge. And there are many ridges in Rautavaara area, fairly small, beautiful… with lakes, forests and swamps.

creek

A creek in the forest, so clear you can see the bottom.

creek

Tiilikanselkä

By Tiilikanselkä again, we went there actually three times during our trip. 🙂

river flows

And river flows…

river flows...

…and flows. Until next time. 🙂

-Leena

On the last day of July and on the first day of August…

More pics from yesterday, and some I took today. 🙂

monkshood

Monkshood, extremely poisonous from roots to the tiny hoods, and we have so much of it in our garden – this is a very traditional plant in the old gardens in Finland. The man who build this house was very much a garden man, we’ve heard, so, no wonder – the fact can be seen in our garden today…

monkshood

marigold

Some sort of marigold, very small marigold.

DSC04750

We can’t remember what this flower is… I’ve tried to google it, but no luck with that. EDIT: This flower is clarkia or godetia, silkkikukka in Finnish. Thanks for the answer, A! 🙂

cornflower

More pics of my cornflowers. Many charming colours they have…

cornflower

cornflower

cosmos

The first cosmos flower this summer, opened today, missing one petal. I had cosmos flowers last summer, too. These are growing from seeds, of course, and I like them a lot. 🙂

butterfly flower

Butterfly flower, schizanthus, poor man’s orchid again…

strawflower

And strawflowers again. Here it can be seen that our tall strawflowers and the shorter butterfly flowers as well as tiny marigolds are tight neighbours. 😀

strawflower

Pyhäjärvi

Yesterday evening by the lake Pyhäjärvi, after some Nordic walking and eating blueberries again. It was so nice to sit on a bench – the air was perfect, not at all warm, not at all cold. The sun was shining, but wasn’t warming, and the wind was blowing wonderfully. 🙂 And the sound of waves, just lovely…

campfire

A campfire in our garden last night. It can be said that this was my birthday campfire – it was not only the last day of July yesterday, but also my birthday (and by the way, the birthday of Harry Potter —> WTF? -Oh yes, says a Harry Potter fan (that’s me) here, aaand, it was also the birthday of J.K. Rowling herself. 😀 ) And… how old am I…? I’m actually a bit younger than Harry Potter… ;D Just a bit…

-Leena