Lifecruiser

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We need to get out more. We have been planning a visit to a garden to take some shot of the flowers, but have give up the hope of getting decent weather to stroll around in. It’s been rainy and with thunderstorms for the last two weeks. Since we decided to go out.

So what to do? We decided to go and visit the Haga Butterfly House instead. It just took us about 3 hours to get ready to leave home… I have no idea why. Well, yes, one important phone call between Mr L and his daughter took half an hour. The rest is just a blur. I guess we love our home dearly. *lol*

The butterfly house is at least indoors, even if the humidity there makes you feel almost like you’ve been out in the rain. But it didn’t rain while we were there. It actually turned out to be OK. Probably because we decided that we would do something indoors. And had umbrellas that we didn’t need and had to carry around.

It’s so beautiful and peaceful with butterflies. Those amazing creatures, it’s incredible what colors and pattern they can have. But they really are difficult to take photos of. They’re flying around too much ;-) Especially the most pretty ones that you really want to catch.

Tonight, as a perfect end of our “nature day”, we saw two creatures that’s not exactly common here around this apartment block.

First something that sounded like a minor aircraft - behind me indoors - in our apartment! Even though I do appreciate to see different kind of creatures, I don’t want them in here. This was a giant mutant whasp! It’s in the middle of the night, but I certainly did wake up….

Mr Lifecruiser tried to take a shot of it, but it was difficult light so he didn’t succeed with the mission. He did however succeed with the mission to get it out from here, which I’m grateful for. I’ve never seen such a big whasp. It must have been a mutated whasp queen??!

Very strange though, since it was dark outside, I thought they don’t use to be out then? Or had it been in here since earlier this evening? I doubt that, we would have heard it’s loud noise. And I remembering that I heard the sound of it the other evening and wondering what it could be in the middle of the night, so it must have been out then too.

A confused and lost giant mutant whasp queen in the neighborhood. How great. Not.

Just 10 minutes after that, I spotted what I at first thought was a cat outside behind some bushes and wanted to see where it was going. It was no cat! It was a beautiful, prosperous and foxy red FOX!

And Mr Lifecruiser didn’t get a shot of this fox either… Sometimes photographers life is just too hard.

I saw the fox stroll around on the lawn a bit and in the meanwhile Mr L tried to get his camera to be able to focus in the dark. So the fox just strolled away without being shot at. With our cameras.

I’ve never seen a fox so close to apartment buildings around this town. I think it may be because the amount of foxes has increased over here now. The fox scabies they had in the seventies decreased them badly.

Yawning big, I think I must go to bed now [05:00 am], otherwise I’ll not look particularly foxy tomorrow ;-)

Photos from Haga Butterfly House
(The photos after the lilac flowers is the ones we shot now)

And for those who think butterflies are too girlie:
Photos of other creatures in Haga Butterfly House

Did I ever tell you about our TRIP TO NORTH HOLLAND?

I had never been to Amsterdam before and thought that would be a nice place to go in the spring. From the beginning it was all the Tulips they have in the Netherlands that I had in mind.

So I booked a trip for us to Amsterdam and Haarlem in the end of April 2005. Haarlem because of the annual flower parade they have there, which you can read about in the post below.

This was actually one of the trips when the weather was with us too. Or maybe before I had my bad weather curse… It was beautiful spring weather, a bit warmer than we have here in Sweden that time of the year, so oh, we really sucked in all the early spring sunlight!

Amsterdam is such an old beautiful city with all the water in the canals and interesting architecture. It certainly has a kind of special atmosphere.

I love all the bicycles in the city. With all the canals and the narrow streets, a bicycle is to prefer as transportation. There are a lot of bikes to rent too, together with maps of tours you can take.

I don’t know if it was the spring weather and the fact that it was a Friday afternoon we arrived - or if it’s always like that in Amsterdam - but we found the city to be a perfect city just to have some weekend fun in.

I guess we weren’t the only ones thinking that, because it was rather lively already at 6′ clock in the afternoon and we did see one man laying in his blood at the street outside a strip bar, so the ambulance came and picked him up. But we felt safe anyway, because they do have a lot of policemen over the whole city all the time.

This is a sign we saw on the door to a bar in Amsterdam. Where else can you see such a sign so openly displayed?

It’s seems to be accepted with drugs over there, you could even buy special “Lollypops” in special shops that were supposed to make you “happy”.

Though we didn’t try it, since we’re already happy, high and addicted of our own drug - LOVE ;-)

I doubt that you really get happy from using drugs… Getting temporarily high yes, but not happy. Certainly not happy in the long run, we could see a lot of really worned down drug addicts around Amsterdam’s inner core. It was quite sad actually.

Of course we did visit the Red Light district in the evening too, can’t have been to Amsterdam and not have seen it hah? It’s a strange feeling to walk there though, being a woman I mean and see all those half naked women offer their services in these windows with the lights. Made you think about how their lifes really are…

I tell you, it was quite a long lemming line with people walking these streets up and down peeping into the windows. (Sorry, no nude pictures from there ;-) There actually were one man that didn’t look were he was going, because he was looking up at some women at second floor, so he walked right into a street light - ouch! That put a lot of smiles on peoples faces…

I did found the people in Amsterdam very relaxed though, don’t know if it was because the liberal view of things or simply their life styles.

I saw more of the relaxed, “funny” fashion style there. Sometimes people were dressed a bit like in the hippie times in the sixties, the flower power.

Swedes are tall people, but the dutch’s are taller. It was the first time I haven’t feel like looking down at people when we’re abroad. So, I had to buy two pair of pants, because they were long enough!

From Amsterdam we took the train to Haarlem, a smaller, but very nice town with a lot of stores and restaurants too. There were a lot of people waiting for the flower parade, but still a little more quiet than Amsterdam.

Except that we had our room at the square where they had the tivoli. Luckily, we’re not easy disturbed. We had this arm right outside our window, swinging screaming people in the air - through the whole night!

I didn’t get to see the famous Tulip fields, but some Tulips and a lot of other flowers in the flower market. And we didn’t see any of their wellknown windmills, wooden shoes or cheese either, so I count on going there some more time to see more of what the Netherlands has to offer.

WHY hasn’t the day more hours and the week more days - so I can have the time to go around exploring the world more…?

♥ Lifecruisers photos from North Holland 2005 ♥

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I’ve always heard of all the flowers in The Netherlands, so I decided we would go there to actually see them and not only hear about it. I booked a trip for us to Amsterdam and Haarlem in the end of April 2005.

We had heard of a special flower parade we wanted to see. It’s amazing floats made of flowers, all unbelievable creations in the annual flower parade called Bollenstreek in North Holland. It starts in Noordwijk and ends in Haarlem (about 40 km long).

They said it was 1,5 million hyacinths and thousands of narcissus and other flowers used in the parade. Hundreds of volunteers are busy for months making the floats as beautiful and striking as possible.

It truly was amazing what they had done. Fantastic creations. Even people who aren’t interested in flowers are bound to be impressed and amazed over this!

There was very nice festivities around the parade too. People were out enjoying themself. Haarlem is a very nice little town - enjoyable even without the flower parade.

It was a little bit early in the spring though to actually see a lot of Tulips, which I wanted, so I guess we have to go there some time again…. *lol*

Lifecruisers photos from the flower parade 2005

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Did I ever tell you about our MAGIC TRIP TO ICELAND?

We had always wanted to go to Iceland, both of us and we finally made our dream come true a week in June 2004.

We were prepared for bad weather, as Iceland very often is at least very windy if not rainy, but we actually met unusually good weather to be in Iceland. We even went short sleeved up in the glaciers! My bad weather curse only seem to struck when we go to places were you can expect a sunny holiday. And I didn’t get ill either, incredible!

The first day we just relaxed by going to the Blue Lagoon thermal spa to have a bath. And boy, did we bath! We never wanted to go up from the hot water… The geothermal seawater comes from wells 2000 m (6000 feet) deep with a temperature of 36-39°C (100-110°F) filled with silica, minerals salts and blue green algae. It’s kind of milky but oh, so refreshing to float around there. It’s surrounded by lava fields and black sandy beaches.

The next day we went on a roundtour. First to the nationalpark Thingvellir, incredible beautiful of course. Further to the geothermal power plant Nesjavellir which were providings Reykjavik with 25% of all their hot water through pipelines down to the city. An incredible installation, to see those pipelines drawn all over the countryside.

Then we have the spectacular waterfall Gullfoss which falls 32 meters in two steps. The water comes from the glacial river Hvitá, which source is from underneath the glacier Langjökull and floats after about 133 kilometers right into the Atlantic Ocean. We weren’t able to catch that beautiful rainbow above it.

What would a trip to Iceland be without seeing the Geyser-area? Wooha! What a spectacular sight to see those Geysers have these hot outbursts. I can’t even describe it. To be able to get real close to them and actually see the hole in the ground and the boiling water and then, slowly it built up this one big bubble just before it had the outburst way up in the sky as a surprise. Truly magnificent and must be seen to understand the feeling.

The volcano Hekla is the most active volcano there, the last eruption were in 2000, but we just passed that one which I’m glad for… I’m also grateful that there were no noticeable earthquakes while we were there. They have a lot of small earthquakes, every day I understood. Their houses is built with the thought of earthquakes protection and they’re quite ugly actually.

We were doing excursions by jeep into the area of Thorsmörk (Thors wood), which is a valley who is difficult to reach beacuse it’s placed between three glaciers, named Myrdalsjökull, Eyjafjallajökull and Tindafjallajökull. They emit a lot of melting water in the area, creating glacial rivers, so it’s difficult to go there without a jeep. Some days the crossing is quite challenging. An innocent stream can change in a matter of hours to a thunderous torrent.

It was when passing one of those rivers, Mr Lifecruiser bumped his head in the car celing and got some kind of whiplash in his neck. It was also in there the jeep had a flat tire…. But they’re prepared to that, when you start the car enginge it starts to blow up the tire again!

On the way to the area there is another smaller waterfall Seljalandfoss where you can go behind all the falling water, quite unusual experience. And wet :-)

There is also the narrow gorge of Stakkholtsgjá, a magnificent and breathtaking canyon, which we were taking a walk through. The walk included a difficult passage on rocks in the water, so we were lucky that we were well prepared with waterproof boots!

One day we even went out on the sea for some whale- and birdwatching. I was prepared, I took sea sickness pills - for the first and last time in my life - I was totally numbed of them, like a zombie for the rest of the day. I’d rather be sea sick than don’t experience anything at all. We only spotted one dolphin and a lot of puffins that were nesting on a small island outside Reykjavik. According to them, it’s unusual to not spot more than that, so they gave us a free ticket for the next time we visit, that’s nice hah?

Of course, if we now were on Iceland, it was a MUST to take a ride on the Icelandic horse over the lava fields! It was the first time Mr Lifecruiser were horseback riding and he did well, I can tell you. It was very special with their special walk, the tölt. Very comfy, you sat almost still in the saddle. Though there were a bit of problems when one of the leaders got thrown off her young and lively horse, but all went well, luckily.

The nature in Iceland is magical. You feel like you have come to another planet. All those volcanos and lava fields makes it somehow unreal, but it’s amazingly beautiful. The southern part of Iceland do have green fields and plants, so it’s not just bare lava fields. They have also been planting a lot of Alaskan lupines, so we saw beautiful blue fields.

We were not particularly impressed over the city Reykjavik though and a bit disappointed when we got the news that they had closed down their biggest disco, which we had been looking forward to visit for a dance evening.

The Icelandic language is extremely difficult. Even though Sweden are pretty close to Iceland, it’s totally different from Swedish. The names and words are just not understandable. Kinda cool I think!

The last day we booked us in for another trip to the Blue Lagoon, on the way to the airport, they took care of our luggage while we were bathing. Truly wonderful relaxation, you’re coming out from there as a new person.

Like I said before: if we ever go to the U.S again, we just have to make a stop over at Iceland and take a bath in the Blue Lagoon. We dream about that bath, you know, it’s that wonderful. We also have that whale watching to do to again and maybe go up in the northern part as well.

This was one of our favorite trips, so there is no problem for us to go there once again!

Lifecruisers photos from Iceland 2004

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I once had a garden. This is the queen of my garden, the only photo I have left, sadly enough. I’ve lost the name of it too. I can still remember the lovely smell from it.

When we moved there I was absolutely thrilled, this was a totally fresh garden, because the house were just built. I had waited for a long time to have a garden. My already great interest for gardening bloomed out completely.

Oh, how I planned the garden carefully. I read tons of garden books and magazines. I wrote down facts about plants I were interested in, which could fit in to MY garden. I had to think about the frost we get over here too and choose plants that could survive.

I really fronted it as a professional scientist ;-). I knew everything, well, not really everything, but I sure hunted up all information I could. I was very effective. I had a lot of different, interesting plants. Sorry I can’t name them here, I can’t translate them and I don’t remember all the names either.

On top of that: the house were located as a neighbour to the plant school - could you imagine something more idyllic? I could actually stand on the second floor in our house and look down at the plant schools all plants, so I had first knowledge over all the new plants they brought in for sale.

Need I say that I was a very regular customer of theirs? That they shouted good morning or hello to me all over the neighbourhood every day they spotted me in my garden? Or that the owner always were joking with me? Or that I sometimes had special deliverys over the fence and could pay afterwards?

There were other features that came with the closeness to the plant school, such as a lot of beautiful butterflies and never have to worry about fertilizing the plants, because there were always the opposite sex of the plants on the other side of the fence. There were also a bee keeping in the fields nearby. Very practical, except one day when the bees did swarm in a tree nearby and I had to take cover indoors….

My garden were growing, but there were several mishaps of course, it was after all my first and only garden. I learned that it’s a lot of things to think about when gardening AND that sometimes the nature has it’s part in it too. There are illnesses, different soil, different ways to handle plants, the early spring sun can be a threat - a lot of things that can destroy a plant.

Even a male cat who had decided that this was his private territory and it’s best to mark that out very carefully by spraying all plants and the garden furniture too and to be even more sure, even the outdoor grill…. Not even the high and dense hedge we planted seemed to stop him. OK, I confess, I did spray back on him a couple of times - with water. I love cats so I didn’t want to hurt him, but that actually helped a little.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun working in the garden. I really find garden work relaxing - if you don’t do too much on the same day, which very often just happened. It’s difficult to stop when you’re having fun isn’t it?

We even installed a very small pond with a fountain. That was fun to watch, because the birds actually were standing in a line to take their morning bath in there. The pond were so small so they didn’t want to bath at the same time. It just looked so funny. Especially one of the Black Birds were always taking time with his bath, so the other birds got impatient and a bit quarrel could occur. But I was glad to have them there, because they entertained me with such beautiful concerts in the mornings and evenings. They are my favorite birds.

Other visitor to the pond - or maybe it was the rocks around it, were spiders, lots of them. If you went near the pond early in the spring, the whole lawn suddenly moved! Hundreds of small spider kids trying not to get mashed! And we did have a frog that came and visited. I love frogs. Especially if they turns out to be a prince. No, I didn’t kiss him ;-)

Well, this is not a tale, so we didn’t live happily ever after, my garden and I….

After 4 years of hard work with it and it was beginning to look the way I wanted it, I damaged my back severe when lifting a computer at work. I knew I shouldn’t have done that, but I’m stubborn “this girl can manage herself”. So I had to pay for it. It’s probably gone chronic, I’m not well even after this 5 years that have passed.

No more garden work, not even if sitting down, it was the garden death sentence. Somehow it even was the death sentence for me and my ex-man, which I’m thankful for today, because I would never have met Mr Lifecruiser otherwise!

I don’t dare to challenge my back with garden work, I don’t want it to become worse again. It was a living hell for about 1 year and after that it’s only driving me crazy, so now you know why I’m crazy ;-).

So that’s how I lost my lifes garden…

Re-tired gardeners whisper: So that’s why I’ve joined the Green Thumb Sunday. That’s a kind of garden work that I can do. I’m the virtual gardener in the blogosphere, yeeeah :-)

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