A male northern cardinal in Nichols Arboretum.

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Time for another panorama. This one goes the full 360 degrees and comes in a nifty Java applet that allows you to scroll around. Click the image and drag the mouse left and right to do so. The panorama was shot on Silver Lake in the Pinckney State Recreation Area, about 20 miles northwest of Ann Arbor. You should be able to spot the trail of foot prints leading to my position out on the ice.

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The main waterway in Ann Arbor is the Huron River. About a mile north of where I live, the Huron River widens into Geddes Pond. I went there yesterday and found river and lake covered with ice and snow, gleaming under a cold winter sun in a stark blue sky.

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Borne of a desire to have a showcase highlighting some of my best photography work, I’ve carried out a few structural changes on my website. Pointing your browser at RuudVisser.com will no longer bring you directly to my blog. Instead, you get a choice between the blog, my research pages, and a new photography section. The latter contains a hundred or so of my best shots, divided into seven categories. My full collection of thousands of photos remains available at Picasa Web Albums.

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Here’s a 270-degree panorama from the Hohtälli mountain (3,273 m) in the Swiss Alps, taken during a hike two days ago. The peak just right of the center is the Matterhorn (4,478 m). Down and to its left, almost dead center in the picture, is the Gornergrat station (3,130 m), the terminus for the rack railway from Zermatt. Located next to the station is a former astronomical observatory housing an infrared and a sub-millimetre telescope.

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Det er tid for del to av historien om min sommerferie i 2010! On aika toisen osan tarina kesäloma vuonna 2010! Det är dags för del två av berättelsen om min sommarsemester i 2010! It is time for part two of my 2010 summer holiday write-up. At the end of week one, bad weather had stranded us on the island of Senja. The story picks up on the morning of day eight…

Day 8: Hamn – Bleik

… where we woke up to somewhat better weather than what we went to bed with the night before. We received word shortly after 9am that the ferry from Andenes had once again left port, expecting to arrive in Gryllefjord around 11am. With a good hour to kill, I went for a bit of rock climbing near the hotel to snap a few pictures of the fjord and the wind-surfing gulls.

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My 2010 summer holiday took place in the northern parts of Scandinavia^*, with “northern” in this case meaning “above the Arctic Circle”. Knowing that the Arctic Circle passes through Alaska, the Yukon, Hudson Bay, Greenland and Siberia, this might sound like a winter holiday in summer, but it’s not that bad. The Gulf Stream makes the climate in Northern Europe much milder than it is at the same latitude on other continents. Daytime summer temperature are typically between 15 and 20 degrees centigrade—by no means hot, but just fine for hiking and sightseeing.

The holiday, booked through the Djoser organization, was in the form of a group tour by bus (with parts by train and ferry), with flights from the Netherlands to Finland and back. The group of 17 spanned a wide range of ages, from 27 to 72, and came from all over the Netherlands, making for a pleasantly rich mix. The map on the right shows the route we followed (also available at Google Maps). Starting from Inari in Finnish Lapland (the flag), we first went to the northernmost point of Europe, then descended down the Norwegian coast, and finally cut through Sweden to end up in Rovaniemi.

Below follows a day-by-day account of the first week, spiced up with a bunch of pictures (click to enlarge). If you want more pictures, go visit the full album. For stories of the second week, step through the door on your right.

^* Actually, that’s not entirely true, because Finland isn’t really part of Scandinavia. However, it’s often taken to be, and I’ll follow that convention here. If anything, it’s easier to type “Northern Scandinavia” than “Northern Finland, Norway and Sweden”.

Day 1: Amsterdam – Inari

A mostly uneventful first day to start things off. We flew Finnair from Amsterdam to the Finnish capital of Helsinki, and from there to the small arctic town of Ivalo. Cool feature on the Finnair planes: cameras mounted in the hull—one looking straight down, the other looking straight ahead—which were fed into the plane’s entertainment system. The view ahead during the final approach and landing was particularly engaging.

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The first three stages of the 2010 Giro d’Italia took place in the Netherlands. The riders passed through Leiden during the third stage. I went and had a look.

The rest of the pictures are here.