Sunday 14 July 2013

Summer with little snow

We were back in Svalbard in early July. Then it was time to put shorts back to cupboard and find our thin woollen underwear on use.

Actually summers are pretty nice in Svalbard with around +6 centigrades, but it's not uncommon to get some new snow on the mountains even middle of the summer.
Amounts of water destroyed one of the bridges over Longyearelva, river running through the town. Rivers can be get pretty heavy on rainy or warm summer days.

Smell of green grass

What could be better than smell of green grass? Or walking outside on shorts, just having sandals instead of gore-tex boots? Having the sun over you - the sun, which is warming, not just giving light?

Quite excatly one month ago we left from our cold island and met a real summer in the mainland. We celebrated the biggest happening in the summer time, the Midsummer festival, in our neighbour country, Finland.


It was really nice to be just walking around - without a rifle, seeing all the greeness and flowers around and listen different birds singing. Finnish country side is really beautiful in the middle of the summer.
We were overnighting couple of nights in a cabin, nicely hidden in a small forest beside a waterside. And as we were in Finland, having a refreshing sauna every single possible evening.

Nights in the middle of the summer are light without dark time in North, just as they should. The darkness in the summer has always been a strange thing to me. Warm weather and darkness in the same time isn't fitting each other in my dream world.


We were really enjoying our little holiday in the North. Weather was just nice and we enjoyed summerdays with over 25 centigrades. That was totally enough for us! We were having it just fine on those temperatures, but it was worse for our black coated companion. The best thing he could do for to cool down was to swim - and that he was doing as often as it just was possible!


Since we're used to see just white bears around in Svalbard, we went and had a visit in a place to see brown bears.

Even though sign was just in the native language, the pictures was clear enough to  warn, that we needed to keep distance to the bears.