Summer holidays start in about 26 hours, possibly a bit sooner if I can fill in more time by spinning around in my chair. It's been a while coming, you might say. Ok, we had our trip to New York and, while that was a whole heap of fun, travel holidays don't give a lot of time for rest. Usually we go away somewhere for our summer holidays. This year, having already been away, we'll be staying at home for the first time. I'm really looking forward to that. Not that it will be a complete rest mind, as our balcony installer has just announced that they will be coming to install the glass system in about 2 weeks. Before they carry out the install I have to lift the existing flooring on our balcony. It's just a little too high and nearer to the underside of the door if we want to fit mats after the balcony has been closed in. So there will be something to do.
I have never thought about it before, but the glass installer guy told me that they always work right through the summer and then take winter holidays. For the now blindingly obvious reason that no one fits new windows in the middle of winter. Logical when you think about it I guess.
I have put myself down as taking 3 weeks holiday this summer break. Annually I have 5 weeks holiday. I typically take 3 weeks over summer and then a week over Christmas and New Year. That gives me a week left for odds and sods or to save for a rainy extra holiday. Our New York trip came from my previous saved holiday fund so it didn't dip into my annual entitlement. I'm glad that we have such flexibility in our workplace system.
We had a taste of summer holidays last weekend when we spent the weekend at the family cabin. It's a lovely spot by the lake and very popular with all the family. As a result, last weekend was the first time in our 5 years of travelling there, that we had the cabin completely to ourselves. It was quite luxurious. We just lazed around, ate what we wanted when we wanted, and generally didn't have to give a stuff about anyone else. You need times like that once in a while. On Saturday we decided to take a run around the perimeter of the lake. We figured it was about 10k and it ended up being just on 11km. We didn't take it too hard so we had time to enjoy some scenery which neither of us had seen before. Sprinting back into the cabin site I had the brilliant idea that we should keep on running straight into the lake. It always looked great in the movies. In hindsight I'm suspecting that none of those movies were filmed in the north of Sweden where the lake water temperature was still lucky to be as high as 20 deg C. Any thoughts of a romantic escapade shrivelled and died once the water passed thigh height. On the positive side, it did chill down our tired leg muscles nicely. We capped off the experience by hopping straight into the wood fired sauna at the cabin. I'm getting really good at saunas now. At first I would go into a semi panic mode but now I've learnt to let my body relax and enjoy the benefits that only a good sauna can provide.
I think that the cabin is empty again this coming weekend. We're thinking about heading up there again, it's only a 90 minute drive. But then there's the hassle of packing stuff together for 2 days. Not sure if it's really worth the grief. It was rather depressing to note last time that our medications, potions and lotions bag was larger than our clothing bag. A sign of the times.
No comments:
Post a Comment