…..and a long one, in fact the sun doesn’t rise, at all for several months. But it’s fantastic, you can tell it’s day time by a gradual, brief, lightening of the sky, except on cloudy days when it’s a bit hard to tell the difference between night and day. It’s quite good actually, because the hospitality is so fantastic that it’s about 3am before you know it and you just sleep until your eyes open…usually about 10am. Heading off for a ramble after breakfast (a sustaining affair of luxurious proportions)…you have to allow a good 20min to ‘rug up’. Although we only experienced a little bit of snow, the temperatures were definitely in the minus and so we had to put on heaps of extra layers (we aren’t really that fat!) and keep moving fast if you want to be home again before dark around 2pm….
We loved walking in the snow, it’s really hard to describe how beautiful the environment is even when it’s bleak…….one of the things we learned is that you never walk with your hands in your pockets, ice can surprise you at any moment and you can end up sitting on your proverbial……the grandchildren however just skate through it instinctively.
It was unusual being in a wooden city with no ‘high rises’. Tromso has a very frontier..ish feeling to it, which is not surprising being in the Arctic Circle. However, some of the architecture, the bridge building and tunnel systems are state of the art. Imagine a city on a mainland and an island, divided by a fiord, and connected through an amazing series of linked tunnels with roundabouts inside them. And over the fiord, beautiful flying bridges that are works of art…..we would show better photographs, but we’ll wait until there is more light or we upgrade our camera. The trolls of Tromso really know how to build tunnels, bridges and celebrate…….to be continued……..Happy New Year and we hope to see you this year xxxxxxxxxx
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