Norway August 28th aka Monday

The hotel provided an okay breakfast where the main joy was the great bread. Great bread will be present at every single breakfast. I miss the bread. We went back to the airport to get a car and it was a beast. A big black BMW SUV hybrid. Full of all the bells and whistles. It drove pretty well and with the sensors and cameras for reversing, the size wasn't a huge issue and once loaded with our suitcases, it was nearly completely full. Once loaded with shopping from a supermarket it was absolutely full.

The drive was very easy. I took us until the supermarket when my contacts started to get too smeared to see through safely and Joe took over. On the way, we drove along fjords. They were pretty. When we went a little inland, I managed to get the line "I find myself pining for the fjords" out before anyone else which I think deserved a gold medal. 

But the weather was also a little bleak. When we arrived at Hamn i Senja, we checked in quickly and then headed out on our first excursion on the island. At the first view point, we stopped and the clouds broke letting a rainbow through, signifying the departure of the gloom and the start of a sunny afternoon.

We went onto a few more viewpoints and stopped at a little fishing village. We found sea urchins and jellyfish in the waters of the fjord there. It was more rich with marine life than the marine preserve I kept visiting just north of Half Moon Bay and never found a single bit of life. We ended up taking a short hike up a hill for better views. Had we planned a bit better, we might have left us some time to make the hike longer but we weren't expecting to do that walk and finding the trail was a happy surprise. I felt a little under appreciated when making a joke when Joe set a cairn to be our destination at which we would turn around ("You cairn do it," I said to Lisa) and no one laughed. By the end of the trip, they had warmed to my humour some more or at least that is what I tell myself.

Dinner that evening was at the accommodation restaurant (in the white building in the first photo posted in this entry). Hamn i Senya was a little on the swanky side and by far offered us the best meal of the trip. Well, me anyway- Lisa chose a good stew but for some reason Joe opted for a hunk of cauliflower. I went for reindeer steak which came with delicious accompaniments including lingonberries.

Dinner concluded exactly in time for sunset. Being late August, the sunset and sunrise times weren't so extreme though it didn't get pitch black until gone 11pm. Our little rental unit was right at the end of the island and gave us access to wonderful views to the west.

The accommodations there comprised little rental units with a strange but functional approach of having four bedrooms connected to a living room/kitchen and locking off the unpaid-for rooms. So Joe and Lisa had one room and I had another and we had shared space for us to crash. This was really nice, making things a lot more civilised than us all just disappearing to separate rooms, and I was really glad for the ability to make tea. We never really found the source of heat to the rooms though there was a water boiler that gave off quite a bit of warmth. But we all needed to open windows to get it cool enough to sleep at night. Welcome to the arctic circle... warmer than expected.