City adventures | Tales from the Hutt

Monday, 27-May-2024

One of the big spots on my list of places to visit in Stockholm was the legendarily-huge park, the Djurgården. I’d heard stories of it before, from family and friends, and was looking forward to taking a good long walk in the woods. I’d been rocking the city life since Reykjavik, and some clean air and animal sounds were sounding pretty great to me.

After leaving the Vasa Museum, I knew it was a bit too late to kick off a true exploration of the gardens… but I am a pretty big fan of recon missions… and the Vasa Museum is right next to one of the entrances…

I checked my map, grabbed a quick snack, and headed in.

Stepping into Djurgården proper, or at least the nature section since technically the Vasa Museum is within the bounds, wasn’t much different from stepping into any city park – There were beautifully flowering plants, people picnicking, and some folks playing various lawn games. It was pretty, but nothing especially unique… at first.

As I continued walking, the garden became more and more wild. Where most city parks will maintain that base level of “tamed nature”, the Djurgården became less tame. I passed one last restaurant, and found myself in a forest of oak trees and wild underbrush. I could almost, just barely, hear some city noises… but I was essentially insulated, hearing mainly the wind in the trees and the birds chattering to each other.

I’ll admit that I didn’t wander for too long – I hadn’t had too much to eat previously, and the day was quite warm. I got some good exposure and exploration in, came up with a good plan on where to go when I came back, and started to slowly forge my way back to civilization.

Ohh! One quick extra – Something that I’ve noticed in both Oslo and Stockholm. Vegetarian Roombas! AKA automated lawnmower robots! They’re cute, but also just a little bit scary.

Friday, 18-October-2019

Sarah’s Mom and Dad came to visit! If you think Sarah and I have been having a busy year… well, you’d be right. But Her Mom and Dad haven’t had a boring year either, so when they had a chance to escape up to Portland after a business trip, all of us were really excited to get to visit, catch up, and have a nice weekend of downtime and relaxing.

We had a few adventures scheduled up, but we mostly left room for us to explore and spent time together – Video calls are great, and I am extremely thankful to be living in the future where we can video call literally anywhere in the world without even noticing a delay, but in-person visits are still the ideal.

So we walked, explored, took them to some of our favorite restaurants, and explored somewhere we’d never been before – The Rhododendron garden!

First up was Kelly Point park – it’s a lovely walk, and a great way to tire Ollie out a bit to keep the crazy down to almost-sane levels. It was excellent as always, and we even got to see some cool mushrooms! Not otters or eagles this time, but it was still fun scanning the surf for them.

Then, we stopped by Sarah’s old workspace at the Mazamas – The Mazamas Mountaineering Center is where she’d been teaching kids to climb this summer, and so she got a chance to show off the walls and the Mazamas library. I… may have… possibly… gotten a little distracted exploring the library. I admit to everything, and it was awesome.

After the MMC, we headed to the Rhododendron garden. We hadn’t been there before, but Sarah had heard amazing things about it, and it sounded like an excellent place to explore. It was raining, as it so often does in Portland, but honestly I think that made the garden even more beautiful. The rain on the leaves, and the petals on the flowers… it was lovely.