Spring is on its way!

Here is our local version--- https://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/sets/72157706072425041

In the lowlands the first sign of Spring is all the weeds sprouting!

I like the goat!

In Finland, I was told spring officially starts when the first car falls through the ice on the seasonal roads out over the Baltic Sea

Here in Maine it's cars falling through the ice on lakes or ponds.

In Finland, I was told spring officially starts when the first car
falls through the seasonal ice roads out over the Baltic Sea, on the
way to Sweden. I'm hoping that was a joke...

It was, we would never base the arrival of spring on a single event. Anyone familiar with science should realise that you need to see at least a couple of cars falling through the ice before you can state that spring is on its way :-)

Joking aside, there are no ice roads across the Baltic sea between Sweden and Finland, there are too many shipping lanes for that to work. Ice roads are only used close to the coast.

I was 90% sure they were messing with my head (men jag är aldrig säker
med finländarna). I think I read somewhere there was a winter in the
Middle Ages when the entire Baltic Sea was frozen over. But that would
have to be some sort of exceptional, freak occurance.

Actually the northern parts of the Baltic sea, the Bothian bay and Gulf of Bothnia, regularly freeze all the way from Sweden to Finland. But, there is a lot of shipping going on so there are a number of icebreakers working to keep the shipping lanes open and hence making it impossible to drive all the way from Sweden to Finland. (Even it wasn't any shipping, driving all the way would be a really bad idea.)

Will there be pictures from this year's Vildmarksvägen eventually?

I actually found some from a about a week ago: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasterbotten/plogningen-av-vildmarksvagen-i-stekenjokk-ar-paborjad Hopefully they can be seen even outside Sweden. They mentioned that they started earlier this year due to the large amounts of snow. So far they've encountered 4.5-5 m of snow, which is about 1-1.5 m more than usual. And they expect even deeper snow as they proceed.

The road is open: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasterbotten/under-helgen-oppnades-vildmarksvagen

Let's see-back in February it started here with allergies. Every time I get asked the Covid question about coughing, I tell them I was coughing before Covid was a thing.