Alex Rybakoff's blog

This year the autumn depression hit me much harder than usual (most of the recent years I didn’t have any depression at all). I spent a couple of weekends doing nothing (which means for me installing a new fork to the bicycle, small MTB rides around home, housekeeping, cooking, reading, talking and so on). Well, I spent a couple of really counter-productive nights as well, playing Cities in Motion 2.

After all this misery I said “enough!”, woke up at 7:30, woke Elena and we ran for the train. It was beginning of a very nice Sunday.

Our destination was Hämeenlinna. It’s located just 100 km north of Helsinki, but it seems that they already had enough snow to make this pile.

By the way, I have an Instagram account now and this photo is taken from there.

Hämeenlinna lies on the lake (which looks more like river, separating the town in two).

A wonderful fog is something nice to look at when there is almost nothing green left around and there is no sun.

Granite crumbs on the bridges – one of the first sights of the approaching winter.

I like those hilly streets of Hämeenlinna!

But I wouldn’t like to live in such a small town, where cyclists are afraid of being on the road, even if it’s rolling better there.

Hämeen linna. Without the space is the name of the city. With the space it’s the fortress itself.

If you are happy enough to arrive just before the bus packed with Chinese tourists, you will get a personal tour. Guided tours start every hour and usually there are not so many people around.

When I was younger, I thought that it’s boring to visit the same place again. I usually denied invitations to visit some place where I was before. But times are changing :) Even if Hämeen linna wasn’t new for me, it was a big pleasure to visit it again with Elena, to introduce her to the place I already know and want to share with her.

I think the same can feel people with kids. Even if the place is not new, the experince can be quite different.

Some amount of sun passed through the fog and everything around changed for 5 or 10 minutes.

A layered landscape with the lake on the bottom, train as a main moving object, houses in rows and a hill in the foreground. This remembered me Switzerland so much that I was quite touched!

But dreams are dreams and we had something more realistic to do. Hämeen linna is definitely worth visiting, but it was just an aperetive before the main dish of the day: hiking in the Aulanko area.

The path led us up and soon we reached top of the Aulangonvuori hill.

Then we went down to the lakeshore and moved along the Aulangonjärjen polku trail. No wonder that soon it started to be dark, making the landscape to look even more mysterious.

Darkness comes along with cold, but soon we found a solution to this :)

At some point in the evening it was time to say to “Goodbye!” to the Aulanko and walk to the train station.

If you watched Äideistä parhain movie, you will understand what this sign means even without reading the text.

It was a great little trip and a wonderful opportunity to make sure that even in November there is no reason to sit at home all the time.