Walking to Tarvaspää (Helsinki)

One of the most wonderfully rounded experiences I have had lately (other than walking with my arm around Sandy) was taking an absolutely gorgeous walk for a couple of kilometers from the end of the Munkkiniemi streetcar to the Akseli Gallen-Kallela Museum outside Helsinki. (You might remember Gallen-Kallela from a previous art-geek fan-post.)

This is right at the beginning of the walk. There is a very pretty duck pond between a rather bizarre office building with a drive through hole in the middle, where the path goes and some very nice houses.

Then the path winds around for a while among some very pretty birch woods along a long skinny park, with of all things, a frisbee golf course. There are several of those in Austin, where it seems to fit the Austin genteel slacker self image, but it was interesting to see one in Finland.

After a nice kilometer or so of woods, the path suddenly decided to cross one corner of a fairly large arm of a bay. It probably isn't obvious from the photo but the middle of the bridge is floating free on pontoons, not really anchored down to anything.

Here is another one of those places where interesting differences between even pretty close couples can emerge. I was thinking something on the order of "Cool, a pontoon bridge over a bay (ah, smell the ocean) -- maybe I can make it bounce up and down and go sideways." Sandy was thinking more along the lines of "Do I have to do this?" and "Will I turn green and throw up before I get to the other side?" (Sandy had remembered bridges but not the pontoons over the ocean part from a previous visit.)

However, we did get across. No trolls emerged to collect a toll. And before much longer we were at Tarvaspää, the name for Gallen-Kallela's little country house outside Helsinki, which has since been turned into another musuem. It seems to have been modeled after a French chateau fantasy castle, in contrast to the very Finnish log cabin retreat north of Tampere. (Personally, I could be happy with either.)

The museum was fun, with a great bookstore where we finally broke down and bought a pretty comprehensive book of his art that we had been drooling over for a while.

And then we had a drink at the side house to the chateau, which has been turned into a cafe. (Sandy, who is a great fan of Nordic fruit and berry juices, remembers having the best blueberry juice she has ever had when she visited the place in 1975.) We sat on the veranda you see at the right, on a beautiful mellow late summer day and admired the views. (I have never seen a prettier place for late summer than Finland, with mellow sunlight slanting in just a bit -- given the northern exposure -- to delight the inner photographer.)