The sweet smell of lilacs is everywhere.

I was going to sit there to eat my dinner. I guess that spot was nice and warm for him.

Met up with a friend. He’s an avid outdoors bather and suggested that we go take a dip in a nearby lake. I’m usually not so tempted by cold-water swimming (and it cannot be anything but cold at this time of the year) because my body is not so good at regulating its temperature, but I’ve also decided to be the kind of person who says yes and tries new things, so I said yes. The place where we got into the water was a slippery rock, so there was no way to ease myself in while shivering and commenting on how cold it was. Diving right in was the only option. It was pretty horribly cold at first, but the body did acclimate. We swam all the way across the northwest arm of lake Flaten and back again.

Afterwards we baked a roll cake filled with a rhubarb compote and a mascarpone and lemon curd filling. Decorated the slices with more of the mascarpone and lemon cream, topped them with raspberries, and it looked very festive. And tasted quite delicious. If I ever bake this one again, I’d take more of the rhubarb compote and try to make the mascarpone filling a bit less sweet.

This was supposed to be lilies of the valley, with ground cover in between.

On the left, Omphalodes verna.

On the right, Tiarella cordifolia.

The latter is by now purely theoretical-historical; I can’t spot a single live specimen. Already two years ago they weren’t doing so well, and now they’re all gone. I can’t say it makes me happy, but it is definitely interesting that a supposedly reliable ground cover plant for shade is not just languishing but just completely gone after a few years. It really didn’t like this spot.

The metro tile wall embroidery is not making me happy at all. I don’t enjoy working on it. But it’s embroidery day and I wanted to be doing something, so I made some random waves on a random thrifted towel.

End-of-term concert for the orchestra where Adrian is a percussionist. No, you can’t see him in the photo, not even a glimpse of his head, but I promise he was there.

I sometimes envy Nysse his absolute relaxation.

Also: I notice that I can no longer distinguish the part of his tail that was shaved.

I have plenty of flex hours banked and could absolutely get to work half an hour later, almost a full hour, even. But when I do occasionally leave home even just a little bit later, I am reminded about why I don’t like to. Traffic picks up quickly, especially when I get closer to the city. I like having plenty of room, not needing to brake or get out of the way for others.

It’s nice to not struggle to find a parking spot for the bike, and to know that nobody will have taken my favourite desk.

Lövsjön to Kolmården, 2 km.

The only thing left for today was to walk out of the forest to the main road at Kolmården, and then take the bus + train + bus + train combo back home. Which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. I needed the bus from Kolmården Zoo to Kolmården station. I stood at the stop for buses heading towards “Kolmården” but when the bus arrived and I got on and told the driver where I was going, he said he was going the other way. So in order to get to Kolmården station, I actually wanted the bus for Norrköping, not for Kolmården. Oh well. Luckily the next bus left only half an hour later.

Lilla Göljet to Lövsjön, 20 km. Half of stage 34 of Sörmlandsleden and all of 33.

It did indeed rain all night, sometimes lighter, sometimes heavier, and stopped at around eight, at which point I got going.

Everything was wet and somewhat muddy, but there were boardwalks in most of the really muddy places.

The clouds cleared away pretty soon and I got sunshine already for my late breakfast.

After a few hours, it was as if the rain had never been at all.

Section 34 of the trail was average. Uninhabited, maybe, but that doesn’t preclude clear-cut forests.

Lunch by lake Skvättsjön, just before the end of section 34.

The first parts of section 33 were the wildest and hardest-to-walk parts of the entire trail that I can remember. Zig-zagging down steep slopes, clambering over rocks, ducking under and climbing over fallen trees. I’m glad the ground was mstly dry – doing this in the mud would have been… interesting.

All this scrambling took me back to the high cliffs of Bråviken. The view here was much more appealing than the day before yesterday: the waters of the bay were broken up by little islets, and there was a castle on the other side.

The afternoon, after the trail turned back north away from the coast, was mostly pretty pine forests. For a while the path went along the top of a ridge, probably shaped by the ice sheets ten thousand years ago. It made for nice views.

It started raining again in the early evening, with one giant rumble of thunder and a short burst of hail. I hadn’t run across any place where I could put up my tent – not even a nice space, just enough flat ground to fit me and the tent – so I kept going. At the southern tip of lake Lövsjön finally there was a space of some kind. Not much more than a roadside stop, with muddy car tracks, a worn picnic table and a trashy-looking fireplace. There was nothing more scenic to look forward to, and two-three more kilometres would take me to Kolmården with its parking lots and bus stops, so I stayed.

The magic of weather forecasts and live radar maps made my evening a lot nicer than it could have been. When I stopped, it was raining quite constantly. The radar map promised that it would stop twenty minutes later. Instead of cooking dinner and putting up my tent in the rain, I huddled under a spruce tree and waited and watched the raindrops on the surface of the lake. And indeed, the rain stopped, so at least my dinner was dry.

The night was noisy with birds again, especially cranes. I could hear them hooting and at one point glimpsed a couple of them in flight, but they turned in a different direction and didn’t come close enough to really see them.