2018 NH Spring / SH Autumn Photo Thread

Nice pictures!

I would’ve thought your home would appear more lush than here though? Nice countryside pics though, you definitely picked a good time to visit weatherwise!

The arch looks like Wembley stadium to me

Sunset at the arboretum. A thunderstorm came through about an hour earlier.

These are from a couple of days ago.

We walked the Umeå Riverdale again. There were still large fields and lush nature.




Then the day after I noticed a whole new borough that wasn't there when I went to school in the vicinity five years ago. Looked pretty modern and nice for being an apartment borough in Umeå.



This is my friend's house. IIRC it's like 200 years old and has a mark of cultural significance limiting what can be done to it, because it was some courthouse or whatever once upon a time. Either that or it was a house next to it. Either way it's pretty old, like most buildings in that area. A very typically Swedish house.


The whole western part of Umeå is really nice with almost only houses. Many parts feel very rural even though they're in the largest city north of Uppsala in Sweden. Even if you can't afford a real house, you can get a pretend-house here.


We went to the arboretum and rapid half an hour's walk west of the city limits. To get down to the riverside walk there we went down this road. It's perfect for Lommo and his exhilersting fast bends. The drop is probably 50m and it's rather steep; without pedalling you'll easily reach 40kph, and it's very twisty, and may I also say pretty beautiful and lush.


The riverside walk is nice too.



Almost a bit cosy.




Rapids starting to come into view.


Rapids in view.


The surrounding area is shaped funnily by the water, and funnily enough the water level is actually lower than it usually is in summer, even though we just had the spring flood.





There's also this weird buddhist "temple" which really is just a huge concrete bunker with a buddha in the middle.


The Arboretum is supposed to be the northernmost arboretum in the world, but I mean, Norway has got botanical gardens above the arctic so I don't see the point in the title. Also, it's deviced so that certain areas are supposed to represent different parts of the world. You walk from Siberia to NE America, to NW America, to Europe etc. However, only like 10% of the trees there are planted, and the rest are just normal native vegetation, so it's not really groundbreaking. Still lush and beautiful scenery, and fun seeing exotic species of trees if you care about that sort of thing. Pears, Katsura, Ginkgo among others. Here's a bunch of images I don't care to comment.






Apparently fences are rare outside of the Nordics.


Heading back you'd think you'd be tired of nature but nah.



Also, on the way back to the main road I spotted not only wild oak saplings, and giant wild maples, but also a young larch growing in the wild. Never seen wild larch here before.

Everything in Umeå is a short distance. Those apartments are about a kilometer from the Umeå Riverdale in the first two pictures, and apart from that there are bits of forest everywhere.

They're stereotypically associated with the med because they're widely grown across that region, take a look at Tuscany, for example.

nei did you notice a difference in lushness between Germany/Czech Republic and southern England?

Babu gee some of the grassy areas look pretty dry.




Was in Lille today. Suburbia.





Eh? How do they cope without a large fence?





nei's acolyte cycling back from work




Convection towards the western horizon





Hmm I was looking to rent a 32-room mansion. This might fit the bill.





Actually I'd ride my bike to work if I there were cycle lanes like these in suburban Paris. Road infrastructure in Paris is terrible, be it for cars or for bikes. 





Went through a couple catastrophic downpours on the way back to Paris. Lots of minor field flooding in the countryside from constant storms. Pileus cloud hiding the sun:

Looked a lot better when the sun came out. Most impressive thing is the setting, pretty good for a capital city.

But Edinburgh is a proper tourist destination, as is somewhere like Reykjavik, with an even cooler climate.

Might even be better for it to be on the cool side since you'll probably be doing a lot of walking. Sight seeing in Amsterdam with temps in the 40s and 50s was comfortable. Didn't have to worry about it being too hot or getting sunburned.