It’s been a nice weekend, especially today with what must be the warmest temperature of the summer so far (or maybe not – I hear it was really warm during my vacation). I did some scouting yesterday, primary target was to find flowers but the most exciting thing I came across was some over-bloomed butterfly orchids. I also found a beach, or an informal camping site, not what I expected at all. Photographically not a good trip, but I felt good about exploring my neighbourhood. In Loos I knew every little spot in every direction… I want to learn everything about Föne as well!
Then today I went cycling, for a long trip, which for me is over 30 km. Not long in Tour de France terms, but then again, I’ve never seen them do it on a mountain bike. It might seem crazy to do a long trip when it’s so warm, but I love it! It’s the breeze that makes it. Every time I stopped, the heat hit me like a hammer. I also saw a moose, which was actually the only exciting thing on the whole trip. Apart from finding a house with inhabitants and a lot of goats right in the middle of nowhere. I even had to negotiate a gate with a live electric wire to keep the goats in, which might otherwise sound like it’s not even worth mentioning, but I was slightly curious why the gate wasn’t closed on the other side of the goats’ enclosure…
But back to the flowers. I am really coming up with scratch, everywhere I go. I’m so desperate that I am now seriously considering of going to the mosquito hellhole (otherwise known as Mon), because last year I avoided it like the plague between June and August, so I missed a good part of the flower season there. But while it’s bad elsewhere, my garden is starting to look really good! I had a good dose of macro this weekend, shooting the most of my flowers and some of the neighbour’s, as well. It gave me hope that maybe I’m not as useless with macro as I speculated a couple of weeks ago.
I’ve mentioned a few times how there’s not a lot of mires and tarns around Föne. One of the many reasons I miss the small tarns is that you normally find a lot of white waterlilies there, so that’s obviously one of the many flowers that I miss. Then today as I cycled past the Fönesjön lake, I saw that the south-western shore was line with white dots, which means that I now have them closer than in Loos! So the flower score between Loos and Föne is now… what, 100-1? Or let’s be fair, 100-2. There are a lot of spreading bellflower here, and I never saw any of them in Loos. How exciting.