Yesterday evening was interesting….. First dinner: John, Alison and i were treated to a first class meal – quite a surprise up here in the usually frozen north. Moose carpaccio to start, Norwegian Lamb for main and Apple Pie for desert, all washed down with a rather lovely IPA brewed here in the Lofoten Islands: 8% proof no less. So i slept very well!!!

Then i got my first real introduction to the Land of the Midnight Sun: somehow i had got it into my head that midnight here would be a bit like dusk at home. Absolutely not!!! These pics below were taken just before i finally went to bed at 11:15 pm. Bright sunshine!!! There is something really weird about bright sunshine at that time of night – very disorientating…..

Aside from getting my chores done i decided to take some time out today to climb the local peak: Reinebryggen. 1500 feet, no problem for a mountain man of my calibre…. I regularly climb 3,000+ feet a day in the Brecon Beacons and on the Pennine Way. What i forgot was the total distance of this climb is about two thirds of a mile, not the 14 to 18 miles i normally walk!!! And it’s all up steps…. so i started off doing 100 steps then check the heart rate, not really supposed to go above 147. End of first couple of hundreds i was looking like 158 so cut back to 75 steps. That got me down to about 153, so cut it back again to 50 and that worked OK. But i was completely buggered, as you can imagine!!! The climb is supposedly 1566 steps altogether… That’s just slightly over 120 flights of stairs!!! So, it took two hours to do that two thirds of a mile…. coming down wasn’t simple either, but i got down in about 90 minutes. Took a tumble 20 yards from the bottom, no damage done and lots of nice people came to my aid!!! So, feeling truly Christmas Crackered this evening, early night and sleep til i wake. I don’t think it will affect my driving and we’ve only got 250 miles tomorrow, heading further north to Narvik.

The pic of a ship is the Ferry from Bodo that we came in on yesterday…

Onwards and upwards to Narvik tomorrow!!!