Saturday climbing

I went climbing at Haukkakallio on Saturday with Tommi and Hannamari, some friends of friends who I had promised to give a day of unofficial 'guiding' to. Haukkakallio is great for beginners as it has a number of perfectly nice but reasonably easy routes to start on, and my 'instructees' put in a fine performance and got a good number of routes each. Another pleasant surprise was Anni and Toni turning up at around lunchtime, having gotten up a bit late for their plan-A crag further to the north. Apologies to Tommi and Hannamari for not getting any photos of them. My excuse is that I was too busy belaying!

Anni in the harness she borrowed from me because, being quite pregnant, hers no longer fits but still cranking hard on Spanalot 6a. Please feel free to make the obvious joke about how my donut consumption means my harnesses fit pregnant women.

Toni on one of the crag's new additions Jontikka 5+ (HVS 5b-ish?).

Yours truly about to plop unceremoniously off a new sports line Massikka 6b whilst trying to on-sight it. I'm wearing a pair of Scarpa Force shoes that I just received to review for UKClimbing. I climbed comfortably all day in them and they worked fine on the routes you see above - so not a bad start.

Tony on Jontikka 5+; just so his climbing mates can see he can still trad climb! ;-)

Dedicated readers of this blog (I love you!) might remember the missing pizza post from a couple of years ago. Basically in my continuing love/hate relationship with Finnish roadside food, I noted a petrol station café near Loviisa that had seemingly a menu of four things according to the hoarding sign on its outside: "Steaks, pizza, burgers, lunch". But when we went in they didn't actually do pizzas. The original picture I took is this:

Well, we dropped by the same place yesterday on the way home from the crag and I happened to notice the pizza listing is now missing. I wonder how many disappointed pizza fans had to point this out before someone got the can of yellow paint out?

But not wanting to be only snarky and negative, I heartily recommend their home-made donuts to all passing hungry travellers. Mine was great, and with at EUR 2.50 for the coffee and donut combi-package, a steal as well.

Yummy.