The winter in Turku is fantastic. A good amount of snow, in fact as much as in Oulanka and Riisitunturi in Lapland, where I was last weekend. This of course have to be taken advantage of, especially since there might be some rain soon, and a short overnighter on skis was quickly planned.
We started from Rantapiha a little before seven in the evening. There was plenty of snow, and the route we took provided an orienteering challenge in the darkness.
At one point I thought I had made an orienteering mistake and we backtracked and took another route to a place known to me. The last part was easy, but there was no sign of the track from two weeks ago in the open mire. The final approach to the Töykkälä shelter was easy to find, however, since our two weeks old tracks were again visible when the mire began to have some trees. No real photography in the darkness, though. The skiing was rather hard in the very soft and rather deep (30-50 cm) snow and we skied for almost three hours.
The shelter was fortunately empty and we immediately started a fire and made something to eat.
The dinner was quite nice and only an entrée was missing. Fried meat and vegetables as the main course, with the meat having been barbecued for a while first to get some taste. Leipäjuusto with jam as the dessert.
A collegue had told me about a hot beer beverage he had encounter during his years in France. A google search revealed almost nothing in any other language than French, which I don't speak, but I made do with what I found on the web and made an excellent bière chaude with a method adapted to what I had at hand. The spices (bitter orange peel, clove, cinnamon, ginger, raisins and cardamom) were soaked in hot orange juice for one hour to release the flavours, after which a bottle of dark lager beer was added and the whole thing heated up to the point of almost boiling, as shown in this picture.
After that a little sugar and a suitable amount of rum (in this case Vana Tallinn) was added and the result was an excellent hot drink. It didn't taste much of the beer, though, and the next time I will reduce the amount of orange juice. Still, this was a successful experiment.
The evening went on and it was quite late when we went to sleep. It was probably around -5°C.
I got up at half past seven and even Jarkko wasn't up yet. I started the fire and put a water bottle to thaw.
Breakfast commenced and by nine o'clock everyone was more or less awake.
On the skis again, following the track out to the mire I made two weeks earlier in moonlight.
There was some snow and wind on the open mire.
Going on.
Some attention is required, since there are wet places on the mire.
Back at the cars after two and a half hours of skiing. A nice little outing.
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