Nordic romance on enchanted islands

We woke in the boathouse at dawn. The water lapped outside our window and an early boat puttered past in the distance, somewhere out on the sound. The soft morning mist was thinning and from it emerged a family of swans gliding past the wooden jetty.

As the sky began to clear, a wide expanse of water was laid before us, glistening in the late summer sunlight.

We sat on the back deck, watching swallows as they darted and swooped for insects, and listening to the bull rushes sighing contentedly in the breeze. It was one of the most peaceful and romantic mornings we could remember.

Romantically different

We were in the Åland Islands in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden. As die-hard Scandiphiles, we love being up at the top of the world where the duck-egg-blue skies go on forever