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Finnish nature is exceptionally beautiful in autumn. Fresh air invites you to admire various colours and sense the autumn atmosphere. Whether you have a little or a lot of time to spend, there are a lot of things you can do outdoors.
To make sure your experience outdoors is seamless and pleasant, we recommend that you get proper outdoor equipment. Depending on the length and the nature of your excursion, think about what equipment is necessary for survival and pleasant experience.
What to do outdoors
Below we present some nice ideas about how to spend a couple of hours, a whole day or from a few day to a whole weekend outdoors.
Low-threshold activities
Trips from a couple of hours to a whole day
Picnic
Everyone knows that food is the highlight of the trip. So why not build up the whole outdoor activity around food. You can cook a meal at home, or you can also prepare the whole menu outside. One option is to find a place with beautiful scenery and go there to enjoy your lunch or dinner you have prepared at home. In a thermos, you can bring many kinds of food cold or hot to the destination. Another option is to cook something delicious with a trekking stove, and you can find receipt ideas in some good trekking food book or in blogs focusing on outdoor cooking. The third option is to cook your delicacies over a campfire after a careful consideration – but please make sure that it is permitted to make a fire in that area and there is no forest fire warnings going on at that time. You can find easy-to-understand instructions on making a fire in Metsähallitus’ Nationalparks.fi service.
Nature trip
Take a theme for your trip. It can be a mushroom trip (picking up edible mushrooms, identifying and/or photographing mushrooms), bird observation, or conscious concentration on the special features of the nature you can see at this time of the year. Independent day trips in nature are great, and if you want them to be something very special, get an initiated nature guide to show you the most interesting details. You can ask about nature guide services in the nature centres of several national parks.
• mushroom books
Workout
Almost anything can be done outdoors. Trail running, circuit training, yoga, gymnastics, HIIT. Take you and maybe your gym bag and train in the middle of the woods. Ingenious device: find a place near water where you can swim after the workout. Refreshing!
Night in nature
Overnight trips in a lavvu or a tent are nice and exciting regardless of your age and previous outdoor experience. Depending on how long you need to walk before you get to the camping spot, you can pack different equipment in your backpack. During a couple of days and one night, you have time to do a lot of things, not to mention the trips that last for a whole weekend. Depending on the location, your program can include for example angling or other fishing (don’t forget to check and get the proper licenses). Geocaching is a fun way to walk around in nature, and often the caches find their places in impressive locations. At the beginning of geocaching, you don’t necessarily need more special devices than a mobile phone, but GPS devices are of course functioning and precise devices also in difficult terrain, and with them, the battery of your phone can be used for phone activities. Regular food pauses and some dinner spectacle crowns the trip.
When it gets dark, it is exceptionally fun to have an easy and short walk in a dark forest where you can admire the colours in the light of your lamp and the bugs bustling around in the dark. We recommend applying the same theme to your everyday life. Wear your headlamp and go and explore the dark nature: familiar and ordinary places will appear in a whole new light, literally. And a tip for trail runners and other sportspeople: take over even small forest paths with a sufficient light. It will bring nice variety to your evening runs.
• tents