Return to roots: driving a figure 8 and 1224 km in Finland

Time goes round 1, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Teeth, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Pier at Iso Teerijärvi, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Two, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Finally we are back at home, after driving a figure 8 shaped route across Finland, altogether 1224 km in four days. That was a bit too much for me, and apparently also for the children, who endured the long trip admirably but were really happy to return to home.

Here is a little story in photographs, a sort of symbolic description of the trip we had.

Returning to the places of childhood generated all kinds of feelings, which were impossible to put into photographs. I must say that even if photographs can represent reality, they can't represent all things of the so-called reality. At least my skills are severely lacking in trying to show how I feel about certain places, for example those where I lived as a somewhat troubled (who isn't?) teenager some 30 years ago.

In any case, the four images here are different in content and style, showing some aspects of my "travel to the roots" during the last few days. As I said, these are a bit more symbolic in content than my usual stuff, probably because I was trying to process some deep emotions about time passing, generations being replace by new ones, and old things becoming - well, old, and even older.

In addition, I took quite a lot of photographs of the children and other family members, but I'm not quite sure whether I captured anything of value there. Have to wait some weeks or months to see that.

It was also interesting to be without net connectivity for two days. It wasn't impossible, but I have got used to checking daily the status of the world from the net. I survived. In a way, this was another aspect of returning to the roots.

Update: I just noticed I have now taken over 40,000 photographs with the Panasonic LX3 since September 2008. The little camera is still going strong, although I have occasionally started to wish for a longer zoom than 24-60 mm. But the 24 mm wide lens I wouldn't change to a less wide one. Also, I realized I had forgotten a batch of 26 photographs taken during the trip. I'm not going to add any of them here or make a separate posting today, although some of the images were quite nice. But I may return to them some day.