A week before Christmas me and Nick took the weekend off to head to Koroinen, an association-led culture center in Turku, in order to kickstart the Finnish Permaculture Association. I won't write it all again here, so if you are interested please reat the article at my garden & homestead blog Beyond Buckthorns!

We visited Germany for the first time after moving to Finland early August. Boy was it weird to go to Germany for a visit! First of all we flew to Munich and not Düsseldorf like we have for the last 8 years. And we flew back home to Finland - how weird!

One of the (many, many) cool things about living back in Finland is that I get to see my old friends more often. There's a group of us who have been friends since high school and this weekend we got to go on a cruise on the Baltic Sea, from Turku heading towards Stockholm. That's a fun little vacation for us Finns to make, it's not all that expensive, there's good food and drinks, plus the scenery is absolutely amazing, as the archipelago of Stockholm is really pretty and that of Turku is just breathtaking. We had suhc luck with weather too, as it was gorgeous sunny weather the whole time!

For my last piece in the USA 2016 travel journal I will return once more to New York State, to the town of Ossining where we attented a monthly event called The Ossining Documentary & Discussion Series. What that is is a public screening of a documentary film and a podium discussion about it and its theme afterwards.

The last leg of our almost 3-week trip to the US east coast was a small city visit to Philadelphia, where we spent one day, and Washington DC where we spent two days before taking the bus back up to New York and JFK airport.

Remember in part 2 I told we were treated to some ice cream? Well, we were, and what an ice cream it was! We went to Lapp Valley Farm, an Amish dairy farm and ice cream shop (with a drive-through too) all in one! They make their milk products, butter and ice cream out of the milk of ther own cows (which you can see in the first picture - now that is a short logistics chain!).

This very short part 3 of my travel journal is dedicated to the dogs I met during our trip. I am missing pictures of many lovely dogs, such as Mack, Popeye, Lucy, Scott and Leela, but will let these three represent the dog friends I made in the US. Meet Beauregard, a huge St. Bernard puppy; Mason, an old gentleman; and a friendly dog at Dickinson College, who let me rub his belly forever, but whose name I never learned.

Welcome to Part 2 of my travel journal through the East Cost of the US in March 2016! This post will be all about Pennsylvania.

We stayed at a collagues place for a week in Chester County but boy did we get to see Pennsylvania! We took day trips almost every day and even an overnight trip to Huntingdon which is in the middle area of Pennsylvania! I can't possibly show all the pictures of the places we saw, so here are some highlights!

This March me and hubby Nick went to the US to see some friends and biogas colleagues (hmm, I must make a whole different post about that) and to generally have a good time and see new places after a long travel break. We were in the US for nearly 3 weeks and we passed seven states in total (though really staying in three of them). This is my travel journal which I will split in separate posts, because I don't want to flood you with pictures!

Part 1 is New York State and NYC.

I was looking through my pictures from last year and realized I've been pretty active this year, visiting places, doing things. So I chose five pictures to show today - nothing fancy, just snapshots of five days of the 365 that were 2015. I hope you like them.