Greetings!
Today, we crossed over from Latvia to Estonia. It was a long drive, wherein we stopped only for bathroom breaks at gas stations and at the Loosalu Lake Bog. About 30 miles south of our final destination, Loosalu is the largest in Estonia. It was a great break from a long drive, with perfect weather and an easy boardwalk.
This bog is the oldest organic landscape in Estonia, reaching in some cases up to 10,000 years. The first bogs started emerging just after the last ice age. As the 1km thick glacier ice sheet was melting toward the north pole, the meltwater was collected in depressions. Plants grew and died within those shallow and oxygen-deprived lakes, and the dead plant material didn't become decomposed but rather created ever-lasting peat/turf, and turned the water acidic.
The shot pictured here is a
Labrador Tea, actually a
Rhododendron groenlandicum, and this time of the year is the best time to see them
.
Just before arriving at our hotel in Tallinn, we stopped at the
Tallinn Song Festival Grounds. We watched a video on the bus titled
"The Singing Revolution", which featured a gathering here during the last days of the fight for Estonia's independence from the Soviet Union. It's well worth watching, and provided us with important history of Estonia's dramatic return to the independent country it had begun in 1918.
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