Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 10 - Picnics

This challenge is about picnics. Maybe it's something about being British, but I've always loved picnics, whatever the weather. I remember when we first moved to our town here in Russia, a local couple took us up into the foothills of the moutains for a picnic, which involved making a fire from scratch and cutting up our own cucumbers and tomatoes there on the grass. It started to rain. "Oh, we're so sorry about this," they said. "Don't worry," we smiled, "We're British. A picnic wouldn't be a picnic without the rain!".

Anyway, for this challenge I wanted to write about two picnics we've recently taken(although perhaps not quite so recently since it's taken me a long time to get round to writing this post!). When dh's parents were here for a visit we took them to our favourite picnic spot up in the foothills (actually, that very same spot where we were taken in the rain 9 years ago). I like to do picnics English-style, i.e. have things already cut up and made beforehand. Dh prefers picnics Russian-style, where you bring everything along and cut it up and make it there and then. For a compromise I cut up the cheese and veggies at home but bring the breadboard and breadknife to make the sandwiches later. One of the things I enjoy about picnics is that the children can run around us while we stay in one spot, instead of, say, going on a walk, where I'm usually dragging one or more of them along by the end because they got 'too tired' at quite a distance from where I parked the car. Russians never picnic too far away from their car (for fear of it being stripped for parts if it's out of sight), which even means them driving over rough terrain to get as close as possible to the picnic site.

Our kids really enjoy picnics up here in the foothills. Perhaps because it's something different. Perhaps because they get to eat loads of crisps (potato chips) without me batting too much of an eyelid. But they particularly enjoy the clambering about on the rocks afterwards looking for interesting clumps of flowers or following the horses that are grazing in the area.

Looking at mountain flowers

     We nearly always find beautiful mountain flowers that I can't identify in my 'Europe' wild flower guide.




The second picnic we took in the extensive town park where we live. The kids enjoyed playing hide and seek behind the trees and running down the little slopes of grass together. On the path on the way back Sophie and Charis discovered hundreds of little striped snails on the gravel path near the man-made lake. We tried to identify which shells no longer had owners and took them home to join our nature collection box on our school-room table. The girls noticed that these snail shells were very different to to the small black snails we tend to find in our garden. This interest led to a quick looking up of some information about snails in the Handbook of Nature Study and on the internet.

Snails from the picnic spot

Small black snails from our front yard