Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Mild is the parting year

Here are photographs from the stretch between Joensuu and Vuokatti, where we stayed at Katinkulta spa. The length of day was less than 4 1/2 hours, but there was a long time after sunset when it was still possible to see the landscape.

These photographs got corrupted on the memory card, and I had to use a disk recovery utility to get them back, a lot of extra effort, but maybe it was worthwhile.

Katinkulta was a nice place to stay, we enjoyed the spa on three days, best thing being the outdoor pool: outside temperature about -18 °C and two dozen plus-degrees in the water, steam rising up from the water.

(Posting title is from the poem Mild is the Parting Year by Walter Savage Landor.)

6 comments:

Markus Spring said...

Hmm, not that I really long for shoveling snow, but your images remind me again and again of the beauty of winter. Here in Bavaria it's cold (around the freezing point) but grey and mostly dirty where the last remnants of snow have melted during the day. Not really good for the imagination...

Juha Haataja said...

Markus, we did have a nice winter weather, but now it has been above 0 °C for several days here in the Helsinki region, with occasional heavy rain, and snow is disappearing fast.

Dept of snow was 74 cm before Christmas, and now it is 42 cm, and still going down, and all trees are bare of snow.

Cedric Canard said...

Just wanted to stop by and say how much I like this particular set of photographs. Truly wonderful.

Juha Haataja said...

Thanks, Cedric. The winter landscape was wonderful, partly because of sun low on the horizon, and the hills which provided blue shadows to complement the yellow sunlight.

There is a rather big diffence in landscape between east and west Finland, east having hills and ridges of hills, west being rather flat (it used to be the bottom of the sea).

This time the selection of photographs was influenced by a smudge on the left side of the front lens of the LX5, resulting in blur and halo effects, but that isn't much visible in these photographs.

Andreas said...

Yeah, there's nothing more refreshing than lingering in hot water while the steam clouds rise into the falling snow. Unfortunately I don't dare going to the spa while I'm sick. Probably I should :D

Juha Haataja said...

Andreas, I hope you recover, and can enjoy spa as much as needed. I'm thinking about doing something like that with children when we have the so-called winter vacation week at schools.