27th to 29th June 2015 at Mariehamn

Saturday 27th June
Saturday morning was time for shopping. First to ALKO to buy more wine, then to City Hallen for food. This stored has improved recently and is better than City Livs. We also went looking for a car hire place and Sonera for a data sim for our Myfi. Both attempts failed dismally. We then went off to The Maritime museum particularly for lunch. The weather was warming up but the museum's restaurant was shut with only an outdoor substitute with a boring menu so we went down the hill to the West side marina to the rather odd looking wooden restaurant with dragon carvings. Here we had a very good lunch and Kristin made the wisest choice with a grilled beef sandwich with a mustard sauce really excellent.
We returned to the museum and revisited it with enjoyment. They have made a number of improvements since our last visit and I particularly enjoyed the displays of bits of old engines, particularly one piston out of a 70000 HP engine.
On returning to the boat I managed to phone and arrange car-hire for Sunday.
Sunday 28th June
Off in the car to Bomarsund where our first stop was to make sure that the cafe there did serve lunch.
We did a pretty thorough visit to all the main accessible sites including Brannklint, Notvik and Prasto forts together with the cemeteries and a later c.1900 Russian Telegraph station.
We also had a wild goose chase following a sign saying Minneslund. This took us along a dirt track to a small carpark after a surprisingly long time and then onto a boardwalk through a forest. At this point we lost the will to live and retreated. We later found that this was a facility, built with EU money, where mourners could scatter the ashes of their relatives on a special part of the forest; not into the sea as this would be polluting.
 Monday 29th June
We finally made contact with Graham and arranged a meeting at the museum for the afternoon. In the meantime I managed to buy a sim card at Sonera and to enviegle Kristin into a Marimekko outlet with satisfying results.
Our meeting with Graham was simply wonderful. He, it would appear from his door label, is quite possibly the director of the museum and spent something like twelve years invstigating and surveying the Bomarsund area. We were lucky to meet him and we only just met him as that evening he was off to Tallinn to discuss the development plans.
We gained a great deal of information about Bomarsund in the three hours we spent with him. He expressed himself as pleased to meet enthusiasts for this unjustly neglected field. He gave us some printed and published information which we have yet to assimilate.
As just one factoid; during his survey of one of the British batteries, he discovered a large deposit of sand on the top of a stony hill - not the sort of place you would expect it. This was the sand used to fill sandbags used to build the battery and dumped when the bags were recovered for future use.