Photo by Chris Stegehuis, used with permission.

A reflecting lake on a foggy morning.

Blue skies, white clouds.

High clouds with the fisheye lens.

Sunset. The majestic body of water in the foreground is nothing but a small stream whose primary purpose is to provide sheep with water. As I took the sunset photos, there were sheep bleating about sixty feet away!

A waterfall, from the morning of the last day of our trip.

foggy road in the early morning. It’ll be a few hours before it clears up.

Reflecting farmhouses.

And more overcast.

Reflecting cows. Here, all the cows start coming down from the hill, wondering what is going on.

Not a happy cow. Seriously, he came down as close as he could, and he started bellowing at me.

I did the only sensible thing I could think of – I bellowed back. So we bellowed at each other for a while. I have no idea what I just said; for all I know, I just sold Manhattan to the cows for $26.

What’s this – the sun’s coming out?

And a non-reflecting sheep. Run, road-sheep, run.

Abe said: “where do you want this killing done?”
God said: “no, Abe – not what I meant.”

Back to highway 1, heading towards that distant peak.

Not that fast (about 85mph), but it is the fastest we went in Iceland. Triple suicide pass!

Hello random English.

Daniel services the filthy vehicle.

Random convoy of identical vehicles.

Daylight! Look at that, we get a normal-resembling landscape photo.

The road winds between the shore and the mountains, so sometimes it turns directly into the sun.

Out the passenger side window. Duck, Dan!

Green cliffs. Last we saw of these, it was overcast – here is what they look like in direct sunlight.

No, the volcano isn’t erupting – it just looks that way at first glance!

Iceland: home to many bulldozers.

Same high clouds as I had near the beginning of this post. Note the halo at upper right – Dan and I both failed to notice it! I just spotted it when processing the pictures.

Nothing to see here, just a guy walking his cow. (Don’t mind the “JFK, moments before half his brains went missing” pose on the dude – he’s just adjusting his jacket zipper!)

High clouds over the mountains.

Crossing the fjord, as it gets closer and closer to sunset.

A really good road by Iceland standards. Yes, it’s dirt – but at least it isn’t a 43% incline.

Driving fast along the fjord road to set us up for the sunset correctly.

Getting there!

Behold the majestic lake… sort of.

A cloud that makes it look like the sun is trailing smoke behind it as it sets.

And back to the landscape in general.

With a special close-up on the rocks in the foreground.

One with the fisheye – note the silhouette of the bridge on the left side.

Getting pretty near the end.

After an overcast sequence that prevented us from seeing any potential northern lights… here is sunrise!

More waterfalls from the morning of the last day.

Time to drive back to the airport. Why yes, this road looks completely promising!

Ominous clouds.

And we’re back on highway 1 – making a beeline to the airport!

The sun hides behind a cloud momentarily.

Uh oh! Approaching urbanized Reykjavík. What’s this about a freeway bypass to allow traffic to avoid the congestion? Why no, such a thing does not exist!

It sure does look like a freeway, with overhead gantries and all… but there are red lights at every block! I didn’t get a picture of any, since I was too busy attempting to not biff the stick shift by launching in third gear.

Back at the Flugstöð – the airport.

And back in the air. Leaving Iceland. Come back soon!

Eighteen percent? That’s nothing – try 43% later in the day!

Infinite regression of sheep.

Strange tower at sunset.

Behold the northern lights. From on top of a mountain pass, with a terrifying opaque fog creeping up behind us – we outraced it, and we got this perfect view!

Green rainbow.

First rays of morning. We of course wake up overcast!

Clouds at sunrise.

GOATS! This is the one example of a goat herd that we found in Iceland – the rest was all sheep or cows or horses.

Fisheye lens in late dawn.

Highway 1.

The Icelandic horse… bred for hardiness, temperament… and that New Wave haircut.

Behold the mane.

A fisherman in a reflecting lake.

Roads in Iceland have this nasty habit of being made of dirt, and crossing severe hills.

A roadhorse. Sometimes they really do cross their fences and get out.

New Mexico has Shiprock. Iceland has …

More sheep, more sheep!

An old sign, repainted many times between about 1940 and now. Red and white!

Car is stuck? Well, car was – at the time – deemed stuck. Behind the car is a locked gate; gotta make a three-point turn on the one-lane road, with the hills to either side descending at a 35% grade. We put the car into reverse, and found ourselves spinning without motion …

only upon further investigation did we realize that the wheels were unmoving, it was the car that we didn’t put into gear. You see, as opposed to second and fourth (the other gears on the bottom half of the shifter layout), reverse requires an extra oomph – a further pull back on the stick before it actuates. Until one yanks hard, one is led to believe that the car is stranded and unable to move.

You don’t actually have the car in gear, dumbass! will be a recurring theme.

Old sign, with a tractor in the back.

Highway 60 – sign gantries into infinity.

Route 60 through a canyon. A very modern road – built between 2006 (when our map came out, showing it as a dirt goat-path) and now… it has lane markers and shoulder markers and the curves are non-threatening and in general, it is quite an enjoyable drive.

Hide and go sheep.

Cue the pastoral scene. A farm along highway 60.

The western fjords… heading straight into the sun, so excuse the crappy lighting!

A Viking cairn – perhaps the oldest highway sign possible to find, other than the markers of Rome’s Appian Way. These piles of rocks mark the trail, and some date back to the 10th century – and the most amazing part is, that they are so close to the modern rights of way: those Vikings did an excellent job of finding the optimal route through.

Less than 20 feet away from the old Viking trail is the modern road.

The road across the next fjord.

Beware the roadsheep.

The good ship Garðar. Built in 1913, and washed ashore in 1981… and left there.

Majestic lake, or perhaps a small puddle?

The shadow of a cloud in the shape of Iceland. We found that seriously awesome.

The westernmost point in Europe – this rock outcropping, part of a sheer cliff with a hundred foot drop to the ground below.

And here is the cliff, from a safe vantage point.

Garbage pod from the future. Your guess is as good as mine, as it totally looks like it came in on a monorail that was built in the mid-2060s.

The puffin road. Note the leftmost bird: yep, that’s a puffin. And note the road we have to take to get to the cliffs where they traditionally breed. Nope, not the one heading off to the west – that’s the road we were just on, that leads to the westernmost point in Europe. Note the trail heading southeast.

Note that the roads heading west and southeast are labelled to be the same quality. This is patently false.

Oh it starts off almost reasonable-like. It’s one lane, and on occasion you can’t see what’s past the hill, but it’s passable.

Now that’s an omen if I ever saw one.

Third floor: lawnmowers, cooking and baking equipment, men’s pants. Third floor. Going down! Yep, that’s at least a thirty-five per cent incline, and it only gets worse. I wish I had had the wherewithal and self-awareness to take photos of the way down, but no, I was busy losing all command of my bodily waste disposal functions… alternating thoughts of doom between “dying in endless agony on the way down” and “after we turn around, not being able to scale this grade, and therefore dying in endless agony on the way up”.

Bottom of the hill. Yep, this is the “rescue station at Keflavík”. Not to be confused with the Kevlavík airport in the southwest corner of the island; this is a different place with the same name, and good luck landing a plane here.

And where are the puffins? Well, mating season is over; they’ve left for the winter. They ain’t here no more. We fail – there will be no puffin hugging today.

Going back up the hill of eternal death and/or eternal death.

Having climbed back from puffin extinction, we’re now on the main road again. Not that this one is the epitome of safety, but hey, at least it isn’t a terrifying doom grade that consists of little more than two tracks in the rocks and the grass.

Back to the cliff road.

Same ship as the last time – and now it is illuminated by the sunset. Look at that, I shot directly into the sun, and I managed not to fail completely!

Gangsta Dan. We were having a fisheye war and randomly taking photos of each other from approximately 2 feet away, and this one – despite being totally into the sun, came out halfway all right, I think.

This is where I poke the camera through the deck railings of the old ship, and take a photo with the fisheye lens.

The road to sunset.

And the road past it.

A town at dusk.

The obligatory waterfall. Foreground lighting on the pebbles provided by a trusty Maglite 4D (Billy Club Edition).

The coastline, in late dusk.

The very first northern lights photo of the night!

And the second one. Don’t mind Iceland’s excellent quality roads!

Northern lights over the nearest hill. Note the purple band between the two green ones!

A particularly bright flare-up.

And another. Best way to take pictures of northern lights: just keep shooting – think later! I had the camera shutter open 30 seconds at a time, and I’ve left all the actual work to the processing phase. This exposure happens to be 60 seconds – there are also 90, 120, and 150 to be found in this post.

Foregrounds provided by my Maglite incandescent (yellow) and Dan’s Maglite LED (white). In case of emergency, use Maglite 4D to smash whatever is threatening you.

All these photos were taken with my fisheye lens. Implication being, this display was huge – all the way across the sky from horizon to horizon! this is the one reason I bought this lens; so I could take it all in!

Northern lights, and a meteor too!

New vantage point. Staying away from the fog that is behind us!

Note the meteor at the lower left of the aurora, just above the mountain.

More, more, more!

The lights split in two momentarily.

The Milky Way at left, framed perfectly by an enormous display of northern lights.

This is why they call it Iceland. Jökulsárlón – a glacial lake, with bits of glacier always breaking off and floating into the sea. This is the first thing in the morning.

Clouds above Jökulsárlón, in the first rays of dawn.

Dettifoss – the biggest waterfall in Europe!

First mountains of the morning.

Behold the glowsheep. Seriously, under flash, their eyes glow Cherenkov blue.

The bridge at Jökulsárlón. This bridge crosses the narrow section of the glacial lake that empties out into the ocean.

Jökulsárlón at sunrise.

More floating ice.

Dan taking photos from surface level, while I take photos from a hill.

The devil’s spine. Some floating ice blocks are clear – others are blue. Still others are an ominous black.

Close-up of said devil.

Don’t mind the dog, it’s just… cleaning itself. The dog came along with a German couple who had come to Iceland to take photos… the humans went off to take their photos, and the dog came to hang out with us!

Ice in infrared.

More ice. More infrared.

Shake hands! What an adorable dog. That’s me – I managed to snap this photo with my fisheye lens, while the dog was busy formulating the plans by which to hump my leg.

Moving along eastward along highway 1.

Mountains in fog.

Highway 1. The fog refuses to clear.

More of highway 1 – in infrared this time.

Sheep are everywhere.

Complicated highway sign.

Highway 1, heading into yet another spat of rain.

Old, pre-1965 cast aluminum sign. On the main road of Iceland – highway 1! In the northeast of the country, all civilization falls apart, and just because it is labeled as primary and as the one way through does not mean it is actually any new!

Swans – and some swanlings too!

Highway 1 going through the mountains.

And here we go through the mountain pass.

Approaching Dettifoss… note that it is the biggest waterfall in Europe.

What is this sign doing at the restroom about 500 feet from the waterfall??

Looking down the waterfall. I am mercilessly afraid of heights – you don’t want to know how slowly and deliberately I crawled over to the ledge to lean over it and get this photo!

Retreating safely from the sheer verticals of the waterfall… here is the road that leads us from Dettifoss to the coast; and here is a rainbow too.

Roadside sheep. For all your sheep needs.

Highway sign at dusk.

The road to Vaðlaheiði – there are plenty of old alignments across Iceland, and this was once a Highway 1, across the mountains… nowadays it has been bypassed by something more sensible, with more than one lane.

Coming down the mountain.

Just after dusk.

And just a glimmer of the Northern Lights! Note the red fringe on top of the green!

Next day … more northern lights, more scenery… and most of all: more goats!

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.

Behold the murk. Yep, that was it for the morning of the first day! Low-hanging clouds and lots of rain, as we left the airport and headed east.

Why look at that, I took a picture of a sign. This is on highway 35 – the dashed borders for F35 and 31 imply that this road leads to those two. F stands for … well, the expletive would be far more accurate a translation than whatever Icelandic description is abbreviated there. All F roads are execrable in condition and to attempt to traverse them is chancing one’s mortal death. We will not take the F road. We are heading to Geysir, and then past it.

What’s this, it’s clearing up? Quick, head for the blue patch! The white blobs are bales of hay – for some reason, Iceland shrink-wraps them!

Geothermal activity at Geysir. We’ll see in a minute why it’s called that… this is just a little bubbling vent.

There we go. Geysir, everybody.

This is where the road gets F’ed. Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that – I can’t figure out how Iceland deems a road to be F status: F35 is actually quite civilized, and is better than many, many roads that are not F (including a few sections of Route 1, the main ring road that connects the entire island together!). Other F roads, like F206, are navigable in the same sense that the way to the moon is navigable… and don’t even ask me about the Puffin Road, which is too execrable to even receive a number.

Another one of Gullfoss in long-exposure. I really need a visible-light 10-stop filter, so I can keep the colors as nature intended, while blurring the waves all elegantly.

It would look something like this … I combined one visible-light and one infrared photo in Photoshop to get this one.

Hey look at that, an old sign. Actually it’s not that old. It features the post-1965 font, despite being cast out of aluminum – a technique that most places abandoned by the 1950s. This probably goes back to the 70s and has been repainted at least once.

For those wondering – that third-to-last character is a hard “th” (like the middle sound in the word “other”). The Icelandic alphabet contains a few letters that were used in old Norse, but have dropped out of circulation in the other languages descended from it – Norwegian, German, and even English. Icelandic is the closest we get to the language of the Vikings: if one is fluent in Icelandic, he can read 11th century sagas with no difficulty. Contrast that with English: 17th century Shakespeare is quaint, and 13th century Chaucer is a nightmare inflicted upon the student body.

A sheep. There will be many more sheep. In Iceland, there are half a million sheep, to go with only 300 thousand people. Count out the Reykjavík area, in which nearly all of the people live – and you get 50000 people … and half a million sheep. We know who really runs the place.

Who’s the clown with the highway sign? Yep, that’s me, standing in 100 mile per hour winds there! Dan took the photo while I stood by and felt my jacket and even my undershirt getting swept away.

The sign says illfaer vager: “Ill-faring road”. That’s all the warning you need.

And this is our good road. Ominous, but survivable. With four-wheel drive and a good suspension, it’s smooth sailing ahead.

Look at that, some color in the skies!

And a whole slew of colors.

How ever shall we cross the river without getting ourselves killed mercilessly? This is a side road to F35 (F743 or something equally obscure) that we decided to venture down for no discernible reason. And yes, sometimes Iceland just does not bother to build a bridge. Why cater to four insane cars a week? Especially if they are piloted by foreigners who have no idea at all.

Fords, ladies and gentlemen – they are a challenge upon themselves; because water that 9 inches deep looks exactly the same as water that’s 90 inches deep. (Oh, the prominent posters at the rental car facility warning that insurance does not cover water loss or damage did not help!)

Well, this one involved a freakish swing of the steering wheel to the right at the deepest part of the river, but other than that was uneventful. After the fact, of course.

This is a different ford – only about five inches deep across the road. Uneventful.

About four minutes after this ford is when we got the doors deranged by the wind. Damn the elements!

Back to civilization. Here’s me holding the door open with the left hand, and … taking a photo with the right? Who’s steering? Who’s operating the stick shift? Yep, four hands – quite an interesting drive.

A horse. Iceland has three main farm species: sheep, horse, and cow. All are very distinct breeds courtesy of hundreds of years of Viking rule.

Hey look at that; the door doesn’t close all the way. Oops.

Iceland has the occasional suspension bridge.

Oh dear, it’s raining again. Hard.

A waterfall at dusk. I took this with the fisheye lens, thus the funny ground angles.

Red clouds at dusk.

Skógafoss. No infrared or photoshop trickery here – it’s an authentic long exposure because I took it a half-hour after nightfall!

Walking up to Skógafoss. I took this photo from almost underneath the waterfall. Gotta love the fisheye lens!

Highway One after dark. Note – no traffic. This is the main road of Iceland, and it is pretty severely abandoned when one gets out into the sticks!

Where’s that one car of the evening? Ah, there he goes!

Iceland lights up its waterfalls at night!

No northern lights to be found on the first night … but here’s a perfectly good photo of the Milky Way.

next up… Iceland Day Two, featuring more fun in the inlands, more terrible dirt roads, more old signs … and, of course, no sleep, just counting sheep.

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.

More clouds. About the same basic location as the first one I started off with.

The last of dusk. The sun has already sunk below the clouds, and likely from the ground it appears to have already set.

And the northern lights! Somewhere over Greenland or so, not that long before dawn. Why yes, I did have fun trying to keep the camera (and the airplane!) steady. Note the Big Dipper at right – this is a fisheye lens shot, processed into rectilinear through the miracle of photoshop, and thus the dipper is far beyond distorted.

Dawn. Just about to break through this cloud cover and land in Iceland!

And here’s Iceland. Just before landing. Don’t mind the red schmutz at stage lower left – I had one Hell of a time avoiding reflections from inside the cabin, because goodness knows they design those plastic airplane windows less for photographic feasibility and more for not getting sucked out of the plane.

next up: actual Iceland!

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.

What’s with all the E-10s, you may wonder. They realigned the road in 2006 – and they left the signs for the old alignment as E-10 as well!

Not the entire tunnel is lit up blue like this – just the sections in which emergency call boxes can be found. Call boxes are a good idea, even if the tunnel doesn’t have non-cooperative doors at the beginning and end. This tunnel is about 6.1 kilometers long, and is the reason that E-10 got realigned: building it under a particular channel reduces the distance to the Lofoten islands by about 20 kilometers.

On the way to the Lofoten Islands – again. This time, however, it is overcast, and the waters are completely smooth.

Not long after dawn. Fishing boats in the Austnesfjord, by the side of highway E-10.

The fishbowl. Fiskebøl again, as seen a few days ago. (The large image is 6000×2000 pixels!)

A pair of reindeer. Just past Sortland, on the way to Andøya.

Same two reindeer as above, and two more that wandered into the frame.

Highway 82 to the island of Andøya. Yep, that small white spot is the sun.

Hey look at that, the sun’s out … kinda.

Older, faded curve advisory sign.

A pair of white-tailed eagles. Too bad I couldn’t get any closer. It wasn’t the snow as much as the fence that stopped me.

A llama. If they can survive in the Andes, I suppose they can survive here too.

The road going up the west side of Andøya. There is an east coast and a west coast road. I took one up, and the other down.

The road to Å cuts across the island, as Å is on the east coast. And yes, this is Å i Andøya – not to be confused with Å i Lofoten!

Swans in the North Sea.

And one final incident of: mmm… pointy.

I may or may not have been permitted to take a photo of this sign. This doesn’t mean “airport”; it means “low flying planes” – because there’s a Norwegian Air Force base right here. We’re in Andenes, the northernmost town on the island of Andøya.

Hey look, everyone, it’s a secret Norwegian radar installation. And mountains in the background, of which I couldn’t get a better photo because the road curves away from them… by the time one is through the military site, the mountains are at the wrong angle.

This has to be the world’s most remote Toyota dealer. Not the northernmost – we’re south of Tromsø, and I am sure they have a Toyota dealer – but this one is out at the tip of an island that’s nowhere near much anything else.

All glory to the Octochurch.

The island of Senja (which we visited on Day 5), as seen from the east side of Andøya. Note the ship at left.

Our favorite å; just a slightly different view.

Snow clouds overdo the landing by a bit. We’re almost at the south end of Andøya.

Risøysundet – the channel that separates Andøya from mainland.

820 takes us across the bridge at Sortland, to the island of Langøya. A sign old enough to use black Scotchlite (black sheeting that reflects white against a non-reflective background), which was discontinued in the 1960s.

The beginning of a halo.

We’re on the island of Langøya now.

Only half a halo here, due to some intervening low clouds.

The end of highway 820. No, really. It actually loops around and ends at itself! In order to replace some confusion with other confusion, all 820s are signed in dashed outlines, meaning “to highway 820″. Yep, all three of these roads lead to 820 – in fact, they all are 820!

And that’s the last of the sun, as it sorta fades out behind ever-thickening low clouds.

One last mangler, as we turn around and make tracks for Tromsø. Plane takes off at seven in the morning.

Approaching the bridge at Sortland, returning from Langøya.

The only gantry like this I saw. Highway splits are otherwise always done with yellow signs. It’s on the Sortland bridge.

Going fast, aiming for to Tromsø, which is many hours away – with almost exactly that many hours in which to catch a plane!

Northern lights. Just barely there, around dawn, between two intervals of clouds. I took this photo doing 90 kilometers an hour, needing to get back to the airport real soon now. There were northern lights every single night in Norway.

Made it, to be greeted by this, ahem, confidence-inspiring sight.

And with that, we say farewell to Norway. No photos on the flight back – two beers in Copenhagen and I was out like a light!

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.

We start just west of Alta.

Early Sunday morning. Extremely overcast.

Too much fun with fishing boats!

“State Highway Department: building a new E-6, next 8 kilometers”. The old one got knocked off by a landslide! Life at 70 degrees latitude, everybody.

Those super-neon signs sure do show up nicely in the murk.

Everything is grim, including the half-plowed downhill roads. Hooray for snow tires.

In the distance, the sky is actually clearing up.

The village of Badderen.

Distant mountains, inevitable snow clouds.

The road to Skjervøy.

mmm… pointy!

Something gives me the idea that this place does a lot of fishing.

We’re almost back at Nordkjosbotn. Well ahead of schedule. Good to know; that means we can explore some more of the outer islands!

Highway E-6, on the south side of Kafjorden.

You’d imagine rural Norwegians would have better things to worry about than fad diets. You’d be wrong.

Snow clouds are everpresent.

“Hey Elmer, you’ve got something stuck in your teeth!”

Partly cloudy. Totally grim. Norway in a nutshell.

“MIT Fablab”, in Norwegian, means just what you think it means; MIT Fabrication Laboratory. I looked it up. They really do have an outpost, here in Lyngen, Norway.

The suspension bridge at Straumnes, on the island of Senja. Yep, it got dark. It does that from time to time.

Here’s one that is somewhat more illuminated. This is the bridge at Finnsnes, that connects to the island of Senja. This style of bridge is what Norway has preferred since the 1970s or so. It’s simple and it works.

Finnsnes. This is a two-minute exposure, which is why things look very, very bright.

What’s wrong with this picture? The arrow is pointing to the right, while the road curves to the left. It’s a 180 degree hairpin turn: the rightward arrow serves traffic coming in the other direction!

This is all we’ll see of the northern lights tonight. It is far too overcast, but it’s they are around just about every night.

One more. This one is a pretty bright flare, but there are surely a lot of clouds in the way.

As good a time as any to call it a day. Next up, day 6: the last day before we head back to the airport.

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!

On the way to Kirkenes. Look at that, it’s cloudy.

Highway E-6 goes straight through a military base. Thanks to the terrain, there really isn’t any other place to put either.

I’m assuming I am allowed to take photos of the sign that says “no photos”!

Feel the Cyrillic letters. And no, we’re not going to Murmansk.

Okay, maybe just a little. The Russian border is about fifteen kilometers down this very road. One needs all sorts of bizarre papers to get in, and even more bizarre ones to get out. They have to be applied for months in advance – I did no such thing, so therefore we will not see Russia from the inside.

Kirkenes: the last real town in Norway.

The beginning of E-6. Behind us, the highway ends at a ferry dock. The other end is in Malmö, which is at the southern tip of Sweden.

The very, very first E-6 marker. Note that here it isn’t even a priority road – it must yield to all side streets!

The symbolic end of E-6, a few blocks away from the ferry dock. And no, it doesn’t go through all of those cities. Oslo is the only one that it hits.

The road to Grense Jakobselv is closed in the winter. (The village is serviced by a ferry from Kirkenes.) The road goes right along the Russian border. The two countries are separated by a rather small river.

Here’s a sign that gently prohibits me from taking photos with a tripod – several hundred meters past the conveniently provided lookout area from which I took the photo of Soviet Russia. Yep, with a tripod.

Having elegantly skirted international treaties, it’s time to go back west.

Some time passes. And, look at that, the sky is clear. Must’ve been the secret Soviet weather control program foiling us.

Oh, those tricky Soviets are back at their old game.

Snow and ice. Infrared nicely brings out the difference between snow (white), ice (blue), and liquid water (black).

Highway 98. The road across Eaštoroaivi pass to Ifjord. It’s an, ahem, scenic alternate to E-6, and gets maintained a slight bit less vigorously.

A fishery at Smalfjord. In the foreground: uneventful water rippling. In the background: large quantities of snow, both in the air and on the ground.

The oldest sign I found in Norway! Dating to sometime before 1965, which was the year they replaced this font. It’s on highway 98.

Just down the road is another one. And that constitutes all of the old cutouts I found in Norway. Within two kilometers of each other!

Try not to fall off the edge of the road.

That is Eaštoroaivi pass. Note the road between the mountains.

This is where we just came from.

And this is where we’re going.

Note the highway marker buried under what seems like eight thousand feet of snow.

What’s this? It’s contrast!

Ifjord. We’ve made it to the other side. And no, this is not an infrared photo. It’s just that grim.

Fifty-six miles per gallon.

And this is how to achieve it. We’re actually doing a solid sixty or so kilometers per hour. Engine off, going down the hill, thirteen point four kilometers for free.

Iridescent clouds.

Reindeer. As with sheep in Australia – there’s far more reindeer than people in northern Norway.

The marker for the Børselv Bridge. Built in 1947.

And the bridge itself. The first person to get around all those dang power lines will be the first to get a good photo of it.

Yeap, it’s perfectly okay to park in a travel lane. Nobody’s there to notice!

More from sunset.

And, one last one!

Hey, look what’s within striking range! Note how the distance to Nordkapp is longer than the distance to Alta. Usually they are listed from most distant to least distant. Note also that Nordkapp’s distance is patched over from another number.

Why did they seemingly make the road to Nordkapp longer?? They put in a road to bypass a ferry connection. Longer, but significantly faster and less troublesome.

North American drivers do a double-take: diesel is color-coded blue and black, while unleaded gasoline is green. Backwards!

Rekkverk mangler. Now 35% more mangler.

Let’s try to make a dash to Nordkapp, shall we?

I don’t know if Frank Zappa had anything to say on the topic of pink snow.

Let us go through one or more tunnels without any sort of feeling of impending doom. After all, when we turn around to avoid a snowstorm, this tunnel will open its doors just as reliably as it has already done, right?

Oh dear. The porten isn’t åpnering in an automatisk manner. Gonna be here a while…

What’s this! The door’s open! Wake up, gotta go!

Nothing to see here, just a parked bicycle.

The bridge to Hammerfest. Not to be confused with the bridge back from Hammerfest that I posted the photo a few days ago. (It’s at the end of this post, too.)

Hammerfest’s symbol is the polar bear.

We’ve seen this one before. The northern lights randomly appearing over the road to Hammerfest.

The town boundary. We’re in the northernmost town in the world.

And the bridge back from Hammerfest, which is clearly a different bridge than the one that goes there.

And that’s it for day four!

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.

Spot the typo. It’s a subtle one. It’s supposed to be Kilpisjärvi, not Kilpisjárvi. Apparently, not even the Scandinavians can keep track of each other’s diacritic marks. In any case, we’re going there. Only later are we going to Kirkenes. For now, we head inland.

Dawn.

E-8 is the Northern Lights Route. Don’t tell anyone, but that’s where I saw the least of the northern lights: inland. All the good sightings were among the fjords.

Graffiti in a toilet stall. Apparently, someone from Murmansk, Russia was here in 2003. I am quite sure that “San Diego” was the most distant place to get signed.

The Northern Lights Route information sign. Along with the four previously seen languages, we have Sámi.

Let’s learn some Sámi. You first.

The absolute last of the sun.

Finland, everyone!

Snow blows across the road.

Finland is grim.

600 meters to the Swedish border. We’ll be back in Finland soon enough, but we may as well poke around Sweden some more too.

Sweden. A rarely seen stand-along marker for highway 99.

The highest speed limit in this area. Good luck going that fast on this road, though!

A terrible picture of a cutout guide sign. It dates back to before 1965! I saw four in a row in Sweden, didn’t think much of them … didn’t see another until Finland!

Sweden prefers blue and yellow arrows at its T intersections. Here at Muodoslompolo is the farthest south we get on this entire trip, except for that brief run to almost-Kiruna the day before.

English pops up in the randomest of places!

And here’s the cutout guide sign in Finland. Yep, we crossed over from Sweden. I didn’t even bother taking a photo of the border crossing; it was that uneventful.

And here’s Norway, for good this time.

gas: 96 kilometers. For around here, that’s not particularly far. I do not know why they signed it – I saw distances of as much as 300 kilometers remain unsigned.

Some color. The pink is provided by the streetlights in this parking area.

Some color for real this time. Despite having no actual idea where the weather was, I managed to escape the doom and gloom by the critical hour. Just past the Tana bridge, here are the northern lights!

The car is, appropriately, heading north.

A very brief active phase. Vadsø in the distance.

Another flare, over desolate plains.

Clouds ahead… and clouds behind. Here’s where I turn around, to double back and take the road north to Berlevåg, to see if it is clear there.

That worked out well.

The snowplow schedule for the road ahead. The 7am service doesn’t run on Sundays. Pretty dang regular, though: those scattered villages have to stay on the grid! I labelled Turjavri on the map – it’s not even a village. It’s a snowplow shack, and a schedule on a big sign. That’s it.

This is actually the coldest it got during my entire trip. Not bad at all. (-16 Celsius is about 3 Fahrenheit.)

Dawn. Again. We’re looking across the Tana river at the village of Máskejohkguolbba. (Apparently, the name “Å” was taken.)

Coming up next: Day 4. Kirkenes, and Soviet Russia!