The AARoads Blog

now for some actual Iceland, after Daniel Brim and I landed… here’s Iceland day 1.

this turns out to be the least exciting day, as far as pictures go, but hey you get to hear about how we got the door nearly blown off the rental car.

Wait, you did what!!??

Yeap, the wind in the Iceland, it’s something to behold. Must have been a constant 100 mph… I needed to do the biological function that should not be done into the wind so I opened the car door, and wham!, it gets ripped out of my hand and blown completely backwards against the fender… there is entertainment value to be found in driving another three thousand kilometers on a door that didn’t close all the way!

Less containing of entertainment value is how much the dang rental ended up costing us. Let’s not think about that. Let’s just look at some pictures.

Hooray for geothermal activity. Iceland is basically a giant pile of volcanoes.

The waterfall Gullfoss. In infrared – for both the strange colors, and more importantly the long-exposure waves.

An ancient farmhouse. I do mean ancient – it may very well date back to the 17th century. Note the ominous, fog-shrouded, sharp cliffs.

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having finished Norway, here are photos from Iceland – all as I prepare for my trip to Yukon and Alaska. Do we detect a theme here? Arctic Circle or bust!

Iceland will be done in about seven batches, just like Norway – even though I spent only four days in Iceland. And of those four days, here are … none of them.

This set of photos is just the flight between Minneapolis and Keflavík – nothing here from the ground quite yet, but here’s some clouds and some northern lights too!

Clouds at sunset. Not long after having taken off from Minneapolis, so I am figuring somewhere over Ontario.

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Let us behold day 6.

We head out to the outer islands of Langøya and Andøya, and then head back to the airport with remarkably little time to spare.

The shortest place name on Earth. Å. This is why I wasn’t too worried when I didn’t get a photo of the sign for Å i Lofoten – because here is Å i Andøya.

And here is the å for which the town is named. “å” is Norwegian for “small stream”.

A halo, somewhere over the island of Langøya.

The road to Hovden, just around sunset.

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Starting from Alta. Highway E-6 for a while, then an excursion to Straumnes, where there is much snow to be found. Then onwards to the inevitable Tjeldsund bridge.

A fishing boat, under completely overcast skies. The buoy is red, and everything else really is that gray.

A frozen waterfall at Kafjorden.

A boat in Finnsnes Harbor.

And, just to prevent the stressful effects of suspense, here’s a photo of the Tjeldsund bridge.

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day four of the week-long excursion into northern Norway.

Day four features a trip to Kirkenes, the easternmost town in Norway. Further east than Istanbul, even! A bit of beholding of our dear Russian neighbors, and then, heading back west, getting caught in whiteout conditions over the Eaštoroaivi mountain pass, then attempting to make a run on Nordkapp – the northernmost point in continental Europe – and getting stuck in a tunnel instead. Refusing to die, we instead go to Hammerfest.

On the left side of the image: Soviet Russia. Doesn’t look very exciting, does it? Or very different from the Norwegian side, for that matter.

Life well north of the Arctic Circle. One village, two village, red village, blue village. Total population: 2. When the news is slow and the fish aren’t biting, they occupy their time by throwing paper airplanes at each other across the fjord.

This place is not listed on the very detailed map of Norway I had with me. The closest I can pinpoint it to is to note that each house is on the shore of the Vestertana (“west Tana”) Fjord.

Sunset, near Lakselv. Excellent light, never mind the absence of direct rays!

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Day 3 features us exploring inland, into the Finnmarksvidda. So let’s see about the etymology of this word: “Finn” is Finn, to reflect the locals; “Mark” is Mark, as in the Experience; and “Svidda” is the land of snow, ice, and a whole everloving metric ton of reindeer and not much else – except for that one guy with his airplane.

No, I didn’t get a photo of the airplane – I was about five kilometers away by the time the logistical awesomeness of the guy with the airplane dawned on me. Let’s think here; we’re about three hundred kilometers from anything approximating civilization – and here’s a guy with a little airplane (a Cessna 152 or the like) parked in front of his house. From where does he take off? And where does he land? Well, there’s a really flat and straight section of highway 93 running past his house… and a car comes by once every 45 minutes, if that…

now that’s badass!

We start not too far away from familiar Nordkjosbotn, and then head southeast into Finland and Sweden for a bit, before crossing back into Norway. The sky remains overcast for most of Day 3, and thus the scenery is correspondingly bleak. This is about as “middle of nowhere” as it gets.

Then, a mad dash back to the coastline, where the weather is supposed to improve, a crossing of the Tana river – the unofficial boundary between “the hinterlands” and “the even-more-hinter lands” – up to Vadsø, a brief excursion into a snowbank, and hey, the northern lights, just to say we did.

Surprisingly, there are some places where one can walk down to the water’s edge without stepping in eight feet of snow. Note the clear sky, and remember it well. We will not see it again for quite some time.

Rainbow skies, just west of Vadsø. This, by the way, is right after I plugged a snowbank. I tried pulling over, and, well, the snow may be deeper than it looks at first glance. Sink!

There was a very nice active phase right overhead, but I had no time to look; I was busy standing in the middle of a dark road wearing an American-made orange reflective vest… waving my arms, flagging down a cute Norwegian girl in an Audi A6, for whom it was apparently second nature to pull a dumbass tourist in a subcompact out of the snow. 255 horsepower and survival gear is par for the 70-degrees-latitude course.

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Norway, day two on the ground.

We pick up from Day 1 near Nordkjosbotn, and dash south in the middle of the night on highway E-6, to where it hits E-10. E-10 west, across the Tjeldsund bridge, all the way to the village of Å, and then back along the same road, because northern Norway is – like Alaska – very sparsely connected. E-10 all the way east to… well, almost to Kiruna, Sweden, because there is a big snowstorm blocking our path! Retreat again, down to Narvik to get gas, then up again on E-6 – almost back to Nordkjosbotn, actually, but we’re branching off on a slightly different route. The good thing is that even though I covered the same spots over again, there was different light and weather each time, making it highly interesting.

The same northern lights as the previous night – still visible, as the sky gets brighter with dawn. The village of Steiro is on the other side of the fjord.

Typical view in the Lofoten islands.

The Tjeldsund bridge, in late afternoon. E-10 is Kong Olavs veg (“King Olav’s road”), whose modern incarnation was built in 1967 over an old Viking trail from Luleå, Sweden to Å.

Don’t be fooled: this isn’t a sunset in Norway. It’s actually in Sweden, as we look back westward on the way to Kiruna. Originally the plan was to go through Kiruna and into Finland, but then nature intervened.

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Picking up in Tromsø, we proceed to learning to drive stick shift in ten minutes on the road to Hansnes, and then march onwards to Nordkjosbotn and a spectacular northern lights display.

you may note that Hansnes and Nordkjosbotn are in opposite directions. I drove to Hansnes, turned around, went back to Tromsø, verified that I was all right at stick shift by driving around downtown some, and then headed south to – and past – Nordkjosbotn. Memorize these names, and the spelling thereøf. There will be a quiz låter.

Traditional dusk. Actually, this very first night was just one of two times I got a sunset without it being absurdly overcast. (The other time was … the second night!) My ability to avoid rain and snow was pretty iffy, but it sure led to some very interesting conditions!

World-famous glowing trees of Norway. Actually, don’t tell anyone but there’s some car headlights involved. On the road to Nordkjosbotn, in the very last light of the setting sun.

Northern lights over the villages of Seljelvnes and Nordkjosbotn.

Same mountain, but totally different appearance of the northern lights several minutes later.

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the first batch of Norway photos. Not quite on the ground yet: these are all from my insane amount of flying, from San Diego, to Chicago, to Oslo, and finally to Tromsø.

Northern lights! We’re not in Norway yet, and there they are. Mission accomplished, a whopping eight or so hours into the expedition – before the first official night, even. Don’t mind the Brownian star tracks: I managed to keep the camera still relative to the airplane quite nicely, but the airplane of course was moving. Note the purple fringe on the right in the northern lights. Green is the usual color – purple is rather uncommon.

About one-third of the way from Oslo to Tromsø. That nearby peak in the center is at least forty miles away.

Landing in Tromsø. One can see the runway at lower right.

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While I go on a road trip of somewhat large size, here is your chance to see some photos from grim, frostbitten Norway. I took this week-long trip in March, 2008, and will be posting the photos in about seven installments in the upcoming few weeks.

This is just a teaser … three photos from that week.

The northern lights over the town of Nordkjosbotn, from the second day of the trip.

The northern lights over the town of Hammerfest, from the fifth day.

The bridge to Hammerfest. Well, in this case, the bridge going back from Hammerfest to the mainland. The weather was overcast about 75% of the time, so it was a miracle I got any northern lights at all… in the case of dense clouds, I went for the municipal lighting.

Fans of that sort of thing will be pleased to note that there are plenty of suspension bridges in Norway. And a whole slew of other things… I originally wrote most of this post on the flight from Copenhagen to Seattle way back in March ‘08, and it is likely very incoherent, but hey we’ve got the Death Tunnel story in here!

The what tunnel???

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