Just finished breakfast. Went out for a short walk earlier, only 3 700 steps but I did wade up to my knees in the edge of fjord for a couple of hundred metres.
Here are some pictures taken along the way. First the weather:
Now some random wild flowers
An apple tree that I think probably grew from a pip in a discarded apple core and some roses:
And lastly, a knapweed. I think it's a shame to call it a weed.
I must admit the weather does not look too encouraging even for just paddling, never mind swimming in a fjord!
On one holiday in Norway my travelling-companion and I stopped for lunch on a road-side beach at the far inland end of Trondheim Fjord. The water was shallow and clear over clean sand, and reasonably warm to the hand. I stripped to underpants (nudity might have upset the locals driving along the E6) and went in for a quick swim. I know the sides of fjords, like their Scots brethren the lochs, tend to drop nearly vertically to great depth but I could see the beach there shelves only gently for sufficiently far out.
Then I noticed two things. Firstly that my lower legs felt a lot colder than my thighs. Secondly, a peculiar oily sheen. Then realised the significance. It was a hot Summer day and the sheen was by the sunlight on a distinct thermocline only about 300mm below the warmed surface. I was not in the water for long!
Lovely photos though. Yes, "weed" is often rather unfair, and totally wrong for sea-floor wild vegetation. It's not "sea-weed" but as much wild vegetation as that on land. A Weed is only a wild plant where it's not wanted. I've a dog-rose luxuriating in a corner of my little garden. It started life from a rose-bush next to a small railway at a museum, where its roots had put up a sprout through a set of points. Not wanted there, so someone carefully dug the sapling up for me to take home, and it's now doing well!.
@ArishMell I don't think nudity would have caused a great deal of upset to the locals. While not all that common here it is also not regarded as particularly shocking. There is a section of Frogner park in Oslo that is used for topless sunbathing and what annoys the locals most is foreign men staring. Frogner park is sometimes referred to as the Vigeland sculpture park, if you ever visit Norway again I recommend taking a day in Oslo, it's worth it just to see the statues.
As for the water temperature, it's a bit different on my side of the country. The fjord here is not like the west coast stereotype. The bottom is filled with glacial mud and sand and while there is a pretty steep drop into the saling channel there is shallow water out to about a hundred metres from the high water mark. When I am here in the summer if it is warm enough I wade with the water up to my chest. The sailing channel has to be dredged to allow cargo ships to get in and is only 12 m deep.
At low tide when we have a warm summer then the water temperature in the shallows can be well over 20°C. The normal tidal range here is only about 200 mm but the actual level covers a variation of 500 mm depending on the weather and how much water is coming down the river. When the snow is melting in the mountains at the beginning of summer the water is under 10°C until half way through May.
We have a different sort of temperature distribution here. The water coming down the river is almost always colder than the sea temperature so where the waters are mixing we have colder fresh water at the top in some places. But there is also a fairly strong flow of water so you can find that you are wading or swimming in pleasantly warm water but as you move upstream around a corner it suddenly becomes very much colder.
It was thoughtful of your railway person to dig up the rose carefully enough to transplant it. Reminds me that I have to trim my bushes and trees. Not today though much too damp, I just hope we'll get a few dry days before it gets cold.
@ninalanyon Well, I suppose I would have been a reasonable distance from the road. The beach, as I recall, was fairly wide.
I've seen the term "meerkat" used for types who visit naturist spots and keep popping up and down like the real mongooses, to gawp at others.
Ah, yes, I have seen photos of the Frogner / Vigeland sculptures (I think under the latter name). I have been to Oslo once, spending two nights at a campsite just outside of the city. We visited the Resistance and the Long-boat museums. I recall we were all rather quiet on leaving the first one. Whether I ever go abroad again is another matter. It's pretty unlikely I think, and I let my passport expire at least four years ago.
Sea temperatures around here are usually at their lowest in February/March and highest in late August and September, and there is a pleasant little beach about 15 minutes walk from my home. Though at low tides, anyone reasonably tall has to wade out for a long distance to find water deep enough for swimming properly.
I have a friend who enjoys this cold-water swimming lark, and I have been with her to one or two of her favourite river pools. Brrrrr! She told me about these cold-water competitions so severe you have to have a dresser to help dry and dress you immediately after coming out of the water. Ah well, each to their own I suppose. My friend doesn't go as far as that!
I spent much of this afternoon in the warm sunshine, trimming shrubs. I've a buddleia that's now approaching 3m tall and becoming unwieldy so I'm going to cut it right back this Autumn, starting now with lopping the tall stems down once all their flowers have died off.
That rose is going to need pruning too! It took a season or two to get used to its new home but is now becoming about as big as I should let it.
@ArishMell Brr, I agree about the cold water swimming, sounds like torture to me, makes me feel cold just thinking about it!
I've never been to the Resistance museum. When I was in Thailand on business we took a trip to the River Kwai and as part of the tip visited the museum built by the local Buddhist abbot as a memorial to the many local people who died building the Burma Railway. It was a very simple building with very simple exhibits, several were simple glass cases several metres long full of skulls. All of us on this sight seeing trip were quiet there too. On the way back we stopped briefly at the Commonwealth War Graves, which in it's own way was also quite horrifying; it was so well kept and there were a remarkable number of recently placed flowers on the graves.
I decided after that that I don't need to visit any more memorials of that kind, I just have to think back to the horror of the sheer quantity of people destroyed there. For instance, I have spent quite a lot of time in Krakow on business but I have never visited Auschwitz even though it is quite close by.
Finally finished reviewing the inactive ads and matching them up with the actual items to make sure I don't advertise something that has already been sold, given away, or simply lost. Found half a dozen items in the boxes that don't seem to have matching ads, very odd.
So now I just have five fifty litre boxes of things that I collected together before my holiday but hadn't got around to posting. That will take a bit longer to deal with as each one needs a description and at least one photograph. I think I'll put that off for a day or tow and get on with something more important. this evening. But there are nice smells coming from the kitchen so it must be nearly dinner time.
Had a pleasant surprise yesterday evening, an email from an old flame. We had a sort of online affair starting about fifteen years ago. It was the nearest I ever got to being unfaithful to my wife. We exchanged a lot of messages in the first few years playing our roles as lovers and sexual partners. But eventually we drifted apart; mostly my fault I think, I found my imagination flagging a little, not really very good at the role playing thing in the end and as it could never be a physical relationship. 'she' is in the US, the spark sort of faded for me. Still it was an important stage in my journey and it seems in hers. She is attending a LGBQT+ meeting this evening and is looking for love. She sent me some pictures, I was pleased to see her looking happy. I think I should make more effort to stay in contact. I've invited her to take a look at my blog here, I do hope she does and ads the occasional comment.
@turbineman40 We never met in person, it was all online via email, Yahoo chat, some video chat, Flickr. I'd love to meet her. She's not all that far from you I think in north east Georgia.
@turbineman40 I really couldn't say. But if you give me some way that she can use to contact you I can pass it on. Don't post it here, post it in a private message. I'll send you a private message in a moment.
@turbineman40 It's just a short walk to the shore from my house, about ten minutes walk and it's a very fertile landscape so it's full of plants of various kinds. Lots of fruit trees (apples, cherries) in the fields too in addition to those 'wild' apple trees and rose bushes.
