Sweden's Nature

Alright, so now I just need to dedicate this post to the nature of Sweden! And maybe to its people aswell. As you might have noticed we're being quite active here, with lots of hiking or other stuff outside the city, in the nature. Just this last weekend, on Saturday, I went to the half island Gålö with a small group. We actually were planning on doing the big tour of 12 km, but after about 8 km we arrived at a camping place, got some ice cream and decided to take the next bus from there – and that was a pretty good idea, since once we sat on the bus it started raining. But back to the topic, the nature. This hiking trip I just mentioned was of course not the only beautiful nature I have seen here, but it was certainly quite extraordinary! That half island (it's actually just attached to the main land by a very small piece) is pretty much split in the middle my a wall of rocks. On the way there we went on one side, on the way back on the other side of the rocks. And we thought we were on a different island! There were basically three kinds of landscapes on that small piece of land. On the one side there were conifers, some dry moss and some blueberry bushes quite low on the ground. On the top of the rocks (there was some serious climbing needed to get up there, at least compared to what you find around Hanover ;)) there were also blueberry bushes, a little less trees and lots of rock surface. But once we got on the other side, there was a beautiful broad-leaved forest (closer to the rocks more of a mixed forest), with lots of soft, bright green moss on the gound, more of a boggish ground (at least closer to the water) and fern. (I hope all those botanical words are translated correctly, I had to look up most of them ;)). So, there were these three different landcapes, all within a few hundred meters (have a look at a map, Gålö is quite long but narrow!) Anyways, it was amazing! I cannot say it often enough… Another thing I like is that Sweden is just covered with nature reserves/parks. There they try to leave everything just as it is. That means, that most paths are just paths because every once in a while people walk along. So it's quite common that the way is not always well-maintained or even artificial and you need to climb up rocks or over trees that fell down since those are not taken away either. This actually made me be happy for the hiking shoes I got ;) One time we even had to walk through the sea since there was no other way around. I am pretty amazed by that, I mean just imagine, a piece (actually quite a lot of pieces) of untouched nature this close to the capital! Until now we could reach everything with our public transport ticket to Stockholm (which makes those trips quite cheap aswell). Alright, I guess I babbled enough, now I'll show you a few pictures, even though they can never show the real beauty of it all… So you'll just have to get over here and look at it yourself ;) Oh and btw I finally put up some cloud-pictures as promised and some of them are from the Gålö-Trip aswell (which are of course part of the nature aswell – and that makes it even more amazing :))