The campsite at Vaasa is closed for winter, and closed with gates so it doesn’t offer a staff-less winter service that most of the other city sites do. I was keen to have a day around the city, so opted for the golf course, which is open but with a winter service, so no pavilion, no cafe and restaurant, and only a few players, especially after it’s dark at 5:00 pm, as the hour changed all across Europe on Sunday morning.
The course is not a links, but near Pilvilampi lake, which is the major outdoor recreation area for Vaasa. We arrived on Saturday afternoon, and went out to the trails for a couple of hours, and did the same on Sunday morning, and saw no one else hiking or cycling. The weather continued to be mild for the season, and calm, at least until Sunday evening.
On Sunday we moved an hour’s drive south along the coast, to Harrström. It offers a community maintained area for campervans which is one of the best I have stayed at. Harrström is a historic fishing village and has been designated a site of national significance due to the cultural heritage of Storhamn, its natural harbour. The people who live here are mostly Swedish speaking Finns, though there has been considerable depopulation since the 1960s, and those who are still there consist of an aging population, many young people have moved away.
As well as parking for vans, an old fishing hut has been converted to bathrooms, and another to a lounge, which acts as a museum also, with memorabilia and photographs around the wall. After a couple of calm weeks, without rain, it was a stormy night, but nothing like the wild weather of Western Europe this weekend.
This morning I’ve moved inland to Parra National Park, which is a new area of natural forest that offers year round outdoor opportunities. Though it’s busy time is when snow is on the ground, it offers trails that are suitable for all year round.
It’s Halloween week, something I always like to adapt my reading and film watching around. I’ve been disappointed with the year’s highly rated raft of horror films, the likes of Backrooms, Passenger and Obsession; the younger audience seems to be enjoying them. There has been some decent stuff though, I would recommend, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and Leviticus, both of which have deeper themes to them than just trying to get a jump scare. A podcast I listened to last week discussed horror anthology films, things like Dead of Night, Vault of Horror, and Horror Express. Many from the golden years of the late sixties and seventies. Vault of Horror stands out. I will report back on what I watch.
Reading wise, similarly I have found a lot of the recently published horror to be disappointing. I’m likely to rebound back to a few favourite writers, Poe, MR James, and the collections of more recent short stories put out by the publisher Tartarus.
In a spare half hour I looked back at where I was in the previous few October 25ths..
2025 in the south of Iceland..
2024 in Belgium, travelling back from six months in Scandinavia..
2023 in the Accursed Mountains on the Montenegro side, about to head into Albania..
2022 in Jotenheimer National Park, Norway, snowed in on the way south..
2021 in the Sierra Nevada in Spain, about to head to Grazalema and a five day rain storm.. I’d just had the van since May, it was only its second course..
2020 in the Pyrenees in the T5 headed for a week in a rental apartment in the Picos de Europa
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