With Finland mostly starting the summer holiday at Midsummer, we thought of having a day with some relaxing and fun activity to welcome the summer. It turned into some serious team building!
Our group is still small enough to fit in one (big) boat. In addition to the longer-term members, we now have four research assistants for the summer months: Yurui Wang, Alexander Bakhtin, Paul Ahokas and James Afolaranmi.
We rented the equipment from Hiking Travel, Hit, an excellent local company doing great nature tours and activities in the Tampere area. After receiving instructions and the necessary safety information, we got packed into a canoe and set free on the lake. This is the biggest lake around here, Näsijärvi, stretching about 70 km to the north from Tampere. That trip will wait for another time 🙂 Now we just paddled along the shore.
Here we are, leaving into the unknown.
Setting the pace was Alex, who found another use for his passion in playing drums. We lost the rhythm many times because looking around was much more fun, but our sternman Paul did an excellent job keeping us approximately on the desired direction. We did some zigzagging at first, but we eventually learned to follow the pace set by Alex and paddle (mostly) in sync.
We stopped sometimes to enjoy the nature, watch the birds and just listen.
We made it back dry! and everyone is still smiling.
