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!

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.

Heading west, to the village of Å. Yep, that’s the entirety of its name. “i Lofoten” means simply “in the Lofoten region”, to differentiate it from all the other villages named Å! (Seriously. I know of at least four.)

The Tjeldsund bridge, at night. We will revisit it several times, because it’s a pinch point: from here, several roads diverge. E10 continues to the Lofoten islands, while other roads branch off to the islands of Langøya and Andøya (home of, respectively, Å i Langøya and Å i Andøya – no kidding!). This bridge was just about the last portion of King Olav’s Road to be finished.

I’ll have plenty more photos of this bridge from other days… both day and night. This photo is from the roadside information station that tells about the bridge and the road. Clearly, the trees have been trimmed to provide a view. In Norway, they’re proud of their architectural achievements, and (in stark contrast to the Verrazano Bridge), they encourage people to take photos.

Wind speed: 4 meters/second, as we cross the bridge.

The northern lights are still present, but not particularly active at this time. 49 kilometers west of the bridge now. You can read the sign in the bigger version of the photo. More interestingly, there’s a comet in the sky – something I didn’t notice until I was looking through the pictures! In the foreground, Norway’s famous glowing trees.

(Zoom in from the previous photo.) I believe that that’s Comet 17P/Holmes – the exploding comet of November, 2007.

The moon over the village of Fiskebøl. I’m tempted to say it means “Fish Bowl” in Norwegian, but it very likely does not.

The E highways form a large grid all over Europe. They keep the same number through national boundaries all across Europe and are signed in green.

Look at that, I found the one tree in the area.

We’re in the Lofoten Islands now – here, they don’t feel the need to differentiate their Å from all the other Ås.

Old sign!

Resistance is futile.

Mountains, mountains, everywhere. Norway’s mountains aren’t tall – namely, they do not reach as far from sea level as, say, the Rockies. This peak is “only” about 5000 feet high, for instance. They appear much taller for two reasons: one – the surrounding lands are very close to sea level, and two – they are extremely sharp, rising to jagged peaks that emphasise their starkness.

The cute little fishing village of Bø. Yep, those Norwegians sure do love their short place names.

Note that the road is getting progressively narrower and more winding. E-10 starts out as a major trans-Scandinavian freight route, but as one reaches more and more remote villages, the construction quality starts getting iffier and iffier. Norway, in general, has incredibly good roads. When one takes into account both the construction (large mountains to navigate around, over, or through) and the maintenance (did I mention we’re north of the Arctic circle??), the fact that the roads are paved, and driveable year-round, is a magnificent accomplishment.

Before the blue-and-white town boundary signs, Norway had white-and-black ones. They switched over after realising “oh yeah … snow”.

Construction zones feature neon-green instead of white on their signs, for extra visibility.

End of the line. We’re in the village of Å – just barely. This is actually the official end of E-10: the section that is under construction is a town-maintained road. More than anything else, the barricade is to keep cars out because Å is heavily pedestrian, bike, and boat-oriented. There’s a parking lot just barely on the correct side of the gate: it just happens that, at this time, the suggestion is being made vehemently. Call “175″ if you object.

Ålas, I did not get a photo of the “Å” sign. I was kinda hedging my bets that Å i Andøya or Å i Langøya had one too, and I wouldn’t have to walk a kilometer and a half or so to the official boundary of incorporation. Guess we’ll have to behold photos from a later batch to determine if my bet paid off!

Another view of Å, as we turn around. Back we go – all the way back on E-10, past the Tjeldsund Bridge, back to the E-10/E-6 junction from whence we came – but then we continue onwards on E-10 into Sweden.

A white-tailed eagle. This bird is the North American bald eagle’s nearest cousin, and is Norway’s largest consumer of fish. Seriously – it has a wingspan of seven feet! I barely got this photo as I was driving past the cliff – about one-half a second after it started taking off as seen here, by golly it indeed took off.

Narvik is the largest city in the area. It has a population of an impressive 18,000.

Clear skies: enjoy them while you can!

Austnesfjorden (“the Eastern Fjord”) under infrared.

Reflecting mountains. I took this one while barreling down a hill at a whopping 44 miles an hour (Norway’s speed limits aren’t exactly colossal). No shoulders on this road, and this was before I realized that if I wanted to stop and get a photo, I could just park in the lane. All the zero cars that would come by could figure out how to go around me.

Norway has the occasional tree.

It’s Norway. Two feet of snow doesn’t stop people from having a picnic.

Back in Troms county.

Norwegians love their red houses. Another “through the window” shot.

Back at the Tjeldsund bridge. Identify the car that didn’t notice the “no passing on the bridge” sign.

The informational sign at the Tjelsund bridge. The information is given in Norwegian, Finnish, English, and German. No Swedish, even though that’s the most likely native language of foreign visitors. Swedes are expected to read the Norwegian – the two languages are pretty similar – or the English!

Here, let’s all learn some new languages. That Magnus Lagaboter: smart guy!

Heavy elk moose crossing. What we call the moose, Europeans call the elk. There are no North American elk in Europe – the closest thing is the red deer.

Luleå and Kiruna are in Sweden. That is where we’re going. Well, only to Kiruna. In fact, not there either.

Near dark, as we start crossing the mountain pass that leads into Sweden.

Windmills in the mountains.

High clouds at sunset.

Sweden’s just around the bend. A little further down is what appears to be one Hell of a snowstorm. The reason it looks like that from over here is because it is, indeed, one Hell of a snowstorm.

Sweden. Don’t have anything to declare? Just float on through! Good luck seeing an international border like that in North America any time soon.

Sweden prefers blue for its guide signs.

“That word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.”

Bigfoot-quality moose photo. Hey, it’s the first actual moose I saw on this trip! In fact, the only one! Plenty of reindeer (see: Day 6, especially) but only one moose.

Narvik? Why are we going towards Narvik; isn’t that where we came from? Some time has passed since the last photo, and I definitely ran into the edge of that snowstorm, that’s why. When Kiruna’s eleven kilometers away and I can’t see the lights in the haze of the flakes, that’s when I know it’s all systems retreat. Especially when I see that it’s heading west…

A stop sign. Hey, they’re plenty rare in Scandinavia. Nearly every intersection is marked with a “yield”. Why stop when there isn’t a car for twenty kilometers? It just wears out your clutch. I dunno why this intersection (a side street to the E-10) earned a stop sign: there wasn’t a car for twenty kilometers.

Back to Norway. Thus ends the little Swedish experiment… until the next day, that is.

Narvik, or thereabouts. Home of gas stations. 850+ kilometers on a tank of gas is excellent – but not infinite!

Our first mention of Kirkenes: the easternmost town in Norway. Over a thousand kilometers away – we will visit it on Day 4.

Had I noticed them, I’d have stuck around! Note the northern lights on the right side, behind the mountain. The town of Soløy. Not Soløy i Lofoten, with the white sign from this morning, but rather Soløy i Tverrfjellet – oh, those crazy Norwegians and their unique town names! I only discovered the aurora in this photo when editing them.

A 1940s old truss bridge. This is the first one we run across, but there will be plenty more. They were built well, and they continue to serve their purpose.

And that is it for day two, simply because here I caught an entire hour of sleep, before proceeding onward.

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.

A typical Norway road, on which we learn how to drive stick. The first hill was sort of trouble. Four stalls before I managed to figure it out! Then after that it was easy… second gear, third, four… ahem, click, fourth!? Bueller?

No fourth. Turns out I was trying to put it into a nonexistent sixth gear. That explained nicely why I had such a problem with that very first hill – I was trying to scale it in third! After that, stick shift was significantly earlier.

In any case, Norwegian highway markers come in groups of as many as three signs: a speed limit, a road priority indicator (here, the white and yellow diamond implies a primary road, meaning that at any intersection you have the right of way), and finally a very plain highway number identifier. Here, we’re on state highway 863, going from Tromsø to Hansnes. A three-digit road tends to be a branch of a one- or two-digit road, and in this case 863 indeed branches off of 86.

What Norway lacks in pictorial route shields, they make up for in boundary signs. A kommune is an administrative region one below a county.

Norway’s green guide signs are yellow. Note the middle city – it doesn’t look like it has a Norwegian name, for very good reason: it’s in Finland. The road we’re on (E-8) splits at Nordkjosbotn – one branch goes to Narvik, which is due south, while the other proceeds southeast into cold, grim northern Finland and Sweden.

The constellation Orion, rising over the mountains, in the absolute last of the dusk.

Norway loves its tunnels. We will revisit this theme N times between here and Day 6.

Not long after dusk, the northern lights begin. Note the two purple jets – one pointing towards eleven o’clock, the other towards one-thirty – at the left edge of the primary green glow.

Every few minutes, the lights flare in intensity for a few seconds. Note much lower exposure levels of foreground elements, with similar apparent brightness of aurora.

Close up, over the mountains.

This is the beginning of the brightest display I caught all night.

Directly overhead. This is the widest-angle lens I had, and it caught maybe one-tenth of the entire display.

Here, I’m aiming wildly, trying to figure out which direction will have the best display at any given time.

In the other direction.

That’s all, folks.

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.

This is definitely not Norway. We haven’t even gotten to Chicago yet – this is somewhere over Utah.

Coming in for a landing in Chicago.

SAS Airlines to Stockholm.

Sunset, somewhere over Ontario. I have no idea why I like this photo, but I do. It’s blown out half to kingdom come, but hey … shiny.

Green flash! Second time I’ve managed to get that at sunset. First time from an airplane, for sure.

SAS’s ideas of major world cities: Los Angeles! Mexico City! Havana!

… Newark.

More northern lights. I used a pair of pillows to mask out as much reflecting cabin light as I could. Didn’t help with regard to the moon!

More great world cities: Stuttgart, Stockholm of course… Casablanca… Newark.

We’re passing Iceland now – see the orange lights on the horizon; that’s Reykjavik about 100 miles to the north.

Moonrise. Yep, at the same time as sunrise – impressive for a near-quarter moon. Hooray for extreme latitudes, where celestial bodies track in really strange ways. Recall the moon photo a from a few hours before, and a few time zones away: the moon ducked under the horizon for an hour or so.

Landed safely in Stockholm. Here’s a billboard that discusses the USA. Land of 14 million Swedish invaders! I’m not 100% sure what it says, as my Swedish is just barely to the east of nonexistent. Hey, look over there, an umlaut!

Having learned some Swedish, it’s time to head to Oslo. Yep, that’s a halo around the sun in the upper left corner. And a cloud cover in Scandinavia in general.

On the way to Tromsø – the last leg of the flight, and soon we’ll be on the ground.

Mmm… pointy.

Now getting very close to Tromsø. Here, we get all the elements of the Norwegian outdoors: high cirrus clouds; sharp, snow-covered peaks; and the obligatory set of fjords.

Red clouds at … noon? Gotta love high latitudes.

The main bridge that connects the two halves of Tromsø.

And this was the last photo I took from the air. So, we leave off here for now.

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???

But first, the story of the snowbank – was looking for a turnout around Vadsø, and – well, let’s just say not all of the rest spots are plowed regularly. Oops. The roads are plowed round the clock, but some of the turnouts feature snow that originally fell during the Reagan administration. Note to self: in case I didn’t learn this in Colorado in December of the previous year – do not drive into snow!

After a moment that rhymes with “oh sweet Jesus, this can’t be good”, I flagged down the first car coming down the highway, and she (like everyone else in Norway) spoke perfect English and carried advanced survival gear – including a rope. No tow truck necessary: apparently an Audi A6 has enough horsepower to pull a Hyundai Getz out of a snowbank.

Of course, while this all transpired, the northern lights that I had originally intended to photograph came and went … and I was tying two cars together. I wasn’t about to stand and stare while getting rescued, and for this girl from north of the Arctic Circle, it was “yeap, the usual, I’ve seen that before”. I can’t imagine getting jaded to northern lights, but I’ve only seen them a handful of times!

And that’s most of what you need to know about Norwegian roads: don’t trust the turnouts! They occur once every 50 miles, are not often marked in advance, and half of them are no more than snowbanks at this time of year. So, what to do? Just stop in your lane. Pull over as much as you can, but there’s no need to leave the road. Traffic on even the major highways is very light – especially past 10pm or so.

Hell, pedestrians walk down the traffic lanes of main thoroughfares! They wear their orange safety vests and take the dog for a walk. There is no obligation to yield to vehicular traffic – if a motorist wishes to get around something (human, reindeer, parked car, dog wearing a safety vest, etc etc) occupying a lane, then they’d damn better get in the other lane and make a suicide pass!

Also, one should note that roads are small. There are no freeways in northern Norway – I’m sure there are some around Oslo, and downtown Tromsø has some grade-separated expressways, but out in the sticks, all roads are two lanes, and meet at traffic circles.

Nope, no red lights, or stop signs either – it’s a stick shift country (more on this later), so the need to make full stops is minimised. Intersections of equal importance get a traffic circle, while a smaller road coming up to a bigger one gets yield, not stop. What’s the use in having to go all the way down to first gear when you can see that there isn’t anyone coming for three kilometers?

To complete the experience, these little roads are – more often than not – narrow as Hell, winding, frost-hoven half to death… and occasionally the rekkverk is mangler (an alarmingly common warning sign: it means “guardrail broken”. Hey kids, don’t be the second guy to go off a cliff here!). Curve advisory signs are minimalist – if something is marked as a “gentle bend”, one should assume it’s a brutal hairpin curve.

That said, everybody speeds like the dickens. Speed limit is 80 km/h nearly everywhere, and that appears to be taken as a mild suggestion. Even in towns, when the speed limit drops to 50 and there is automatisk traffik kontrolle (photographic speed trap)… people are still doing a hundred.

Yep, even around the hairpin curves, and when passing a reindeer wearing an orange vest. If you’re driving a tiny little Hyundai, it’s best to just indicate “pass me” with your right turn signal, and watch as a large truck, immediately with no regard for the possibility of oncoming traffic, passes you and disappears into the distance.

Given this sort of driving, you’d expect to see mangled parts of orange vests – belonging to man and beast alike – spread all over the highway, but surprisingly I didn’t see any accidents, and in over 6100 kilometers, only one roadkill.

My rental car was a Hyundai Getz, and let me tell you, this is a great little vehicle! One statistic reveals all: fifty-six miles per gallon. I had been budgeting 30 or something, which is what I’d get in the US, and I nearly doubled it. I’m sure that if I were an expert at stick shift, I’d have beaten sixty.

Those Europeans love their small cars. For $9.39 per gallon of gas, they’d better! Maybe one in every 20 was an SUV, and those all seemed to be playing the role for which they were intended – going camping or ice-fishing or bear-chasing or whatnot. Lots of Volkswagens and Audis and Volvos and other midsized-at-most cars, and also a seeming proclivity towards utility vans for light commercial hauling. I didn’t see a single pickup truck – just vans with the name of a small company on the side. “Johan’s Polar Bear, Bait and Tackle”, “Sørenson and Son Orange Vest Sales”, etc.

Of course, all stick shift. Including mine. I learned. Quickly. My one bugaboo was putting the car into third, not first, upon start and then wondering why I’ve stalled four times in a row attempting to take off.

(Also once shifting into first, not third, and being nearly flung through the windshield!)

I soon got the hang of it, though. I started from a full stop going up icy 11% grades, made plenty of three-point turns, handled those second-gear tight rotaries… erm, traffic circles, and even once coasted 14.3 kilometers down a hill with my engine off before clutch-starting the beast into 3rd gear.

So I declare myself competent at the ancient art of the manual transmission. That said, I still prefer automatic – there are a few photos that I biffed because I was busy attempting to drive – but if that’s what I get in Europe, I will take it.

What else is on the roads of Norway? You guessed it, there are even old signs. I found them on the secondary roads of all three countries I visited: Norway, Sweden, and Finland. I took plenty of photos. In fact, I nearly went and died thanks to a brief moment of sign-blindness: “oh, that one looks pretty old. It’s got a different arrow than usual; I wonder when … oh noes, it indicated a gentle hairpin! Brakes!“.

What isn’t there? Gas stations. Well, there are, except my guide book proclaimed them to be frequent and this is patently false. Sometimes they are 200 kilometers apart, and half of them aren’t open past 10pm or on Sundays. The procedure is something like this: Step 1, fill up tank, paying $109 for the privilege. Step 2, note 800 kilometer range on car. Step 3, congratulations, you’re low on gas.

Oh and what was that about a death tunnel? Much to the consternation of Princess Diana, Europe loves its tunnels. Some tunnels have doors (imagine a garage door) on each end to keep snow from blowing in when the weather is bad. There are sensors located on each side of the door to open it when someone wants to go in or out.

You can guess where this story is leading. I was stuck until a car came from the other direction and triggered the functioning sensor to let me out of the dang tunnel. Given that it was 1.45 am, there wasn’t anybody coming for a while.

So I parked in such a way that I blocked both lanes of traffic, and figured someone would honk when they arrived… and got some sleep. One hour and fourteen minutes of sleep, to be precise, before aforementioned dang tunnel came to life.

And that’s it for the teaser. Coming up next … actual batches of actual photos, featuring actual road signs.