Change of Plan

Well, the world keeps us on our toes. After a pleasant day in London we received email that we needed to head back to Boston to take care of MAma. So it goes with the world.

Here’s to more adventures sometime soon!

On the Road Again

We’ve set sail once again for distant shores.

 Now we head out on phase two of our adventure- a journey to Kyrgyzstan by way of London. We headed out to London a day early both to ensure that weather didn’t deter us, and to have a day to rest, recuperate, and adjust to the changing time zone.

 We’re staying in our London hood, Bayview, and we’re hoping tonight to get to the London Globe Theatre for a performance of Othello. In the morning we’ll meet with Paul McKeating, the North London teacher, and then we’ll head over to the school to start about 24 hours of packing, meeting, and planning.

 Let the games begin!

Final Scenes from the road

About 4 minutes of footage we couldn’t upload from the road.

Heading Home

Did you know there is free internet in the Reykjavic Airport… Did you know that it’s very difficult to find the question mark. We take off in about an hour and then five hours later we’ll be home!!!Oh, here it is.:???

The End of the Road

So this seemed to us like a pretty good place to call it quits. The village of Å at the end of the Lofoten Island. We’d biked 2000km, and if we wanted to go any further, we’d need to figure out how to float on our tire tubes.

The map of the route is here .

So afterwards we went to the island of Røst and had an enjoyable puffin tour where we saw hundreds upon hundreds of Puffins.Not all of these are puffins, some gullies and razor bills, but lots. (Click the photo for a larger one.)

Our guides told us some fascinating stories about the region, including an incredible story of an Italian journey gone awry in 1432, led by Pietro Querini, that ended up in a disasterous wreck near Røst, the upside being that a trade in dried stockfish began which continues to this day .When you need fish in Italy for lent or Friday, you import from Rost.

We’ve now returned to Oslo after a long train journey under the midnight sun, which provided about 3 hours of sunrise, sunset colours from 11-2AM. Here’s a brief video of us biking under the midnight sun on the solstice, and below is our photo from about 11:40 PM. You can see lots more photos if you click the Flickr link on the bottom right.

The plan for now is that we tour Oslo tommorrow, fly home on Tuesday, work and help people get married for a few weeks. Then we head back to London for Kyrgyzstan and China on the 17th!

Not much Island left

Well, leave it to Brandon to start serious blogtroversy.

 We’re in Leknes after a fairly eventful morning. Let’s just say that we camped on the beach and did not identify the high tide line with complete accuracy. Let’s also just say the the Mountain Hardware Trango has a very impressively waterproof bottom. Let’s not talk about that much any more, suffice it to say, it was quite funny to celebrate another Bad Trip Leader Day, which you must celebrate at least once a trip. 

 Tonight we will head to Å at the end of the Lofoten, and then we will ride our amphibious Musk Oxen to Væroy or Røst and catch one last island before the long journey back.

 The people in Norway eat lots of Ice Cream, but its either soft ice or the generic packaged kind. Even cones are packaged. Oh how I pine for Bedford Farms…

  

The Map

Click Here

Not much happens in Norway, but when it does…

First, thanks to all who leave comments, it’s very fun.

 Onto the report- Elsa and I have developed this saying, “Not much happens in Norway, but when it does, it’s weird.” All too appropriate for the North Norway Arts Festival we visited in Harstad. We went to a series of “Border Crossing” modern art exhibits that included things like a giant fur bra, and movies projected into boxes of people in boxers rolling into naked women who crashed down like pins. Then we went to the troll circus, where amidst a variety of acrobatics, a man appeared out of nowhere, fell in love with the moon, dueled the sun and and evil magician, and tightroped his way out. In Norwegian. You can check some of it out here http://www.festspillnn.no/. Perhaps the weirdest bit was despite being the major event in Harstad, we saw maybe 100 people in town. If it’s slow during the festival, it’s hard to imagine a regular sunday afternoon.

 Since then we thought, “Hey, we should go for a bike ride!” So we did, and we’re heading now to the Lofoton Islands. Imagine if you took the top third of the Tetons and dropped them in the middle of the ocean, and that’s basically what we’re looking at.
Right now we are in Sortland, where our major mission is to try to find a form of beans other than Kidney and Baked. 8 different grocery stories in town, 99 ways to prepare pork, 2 kinds of beans….

We’re heading East until the 30, then we promise to start coming home…

Update from Harstad

WE’ve made it to the islands! After a pleasant 24 hours by boat from Trondeim to Bodø, we have biked up to Harstad where we hope to enjoy some of the events at the festpillen- a northern norway arts festival.

 When we arrived in Bodø it was the day of the solstice, so we decided to do a 24 ride under the midnight sun. We rode until midnight where we happened upon a north facing fjord where we could see the sun in all its glory. Then we rode until about 3, took a nap, and rode again until about 4pm. We covered about 220km of hills, fjords, and byways.

Then the day after , we slowed down to about 60km, and found this island off a spit of sand in the bay, where we camped for the evening. Off now to the Lofoton!

Video Bonanza

Well (or Vell, as they say in Norway) we just plunked down 60 kroners, about 10 bucks, to get some high quality computer time for an hour. People around us are playing Starcraft, so basically its the electronic dark ages. Get some WOW people. OK, Elsa just pointed to about 5 people in here playing WOW. Anyway…

All of these are old movies we’ve just now posted. This is from the Hardangervidda from our first week:

Here’s Elsa and I discussing our journey while looking at the really loud double waterfall, the Voringfoss

Turn the sound down for this one- it is a very loud panorama of the Voringfoss

Here is some classic Norway tunnel cycling:

Here are some leaping fishes from the Sognefjord. You probably wont see much leaping unless you really press your nose to the screen or watch it on an LCD projector, but trust us, they were freaking out:

So apparently I have a thing for filming fosses. Oh Well. Start with your head turned sideways, and be prepared to go with it. This one is not award winning.

In this final video, we make a new Norwegian friend, one from another era…