Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

On Sunday afternoon we went for a walk on the island of Håkøya, close to Tromsø. Håkøya can be reached by a bridge, and from the bridge you have a nice view into the very clear water – we saw many starfish! In the other photo you can see my project of last weekend – I crocheted a hat for Paul! Nicole taught me to crochet while we were in Mexico, and now that I’ve gotten over my “crochet-is-for-grandma’s” attitude, it’s been lots of fun, and I’m very proud of my first hat 🙂

A boat passed by in the distance, and created large ripples in the water. They lasted for a long time…

We walked along the shore for a while. The beach consists of rocks with lots of seaweed on them, and when the tide comes up they are covered in water. This shallow layer of water freezes, and when the tide recedes, the layer of ice ends up on top of the rocks. It creates a very cool layer of sea ice, which behaves quite different from “normal” ice. For example it can flex a lot more, and it breaks up in different ways. See the photos below…

Some of the rocks are covered with lots of barnacles, I had some fun taking macro photos of them. In the other photo you can see the bridge to Håkøya in the distance.

There was also a stream entering the sea, and that created all kinds of different sorts of ice. It was beautiful! There were many bubbles frozen into the ice, and in other parts the ice almost looked like a painting with flower patterns.

Here Paul is holding up a piece of ice to the sky, so you can see the bubble pattern better. He thought it would make a good speech bubble 😉 

The views from the beach were really nice. The water was very calm so the reflections were beautiful. 

These photos were taken around sunset, at about 18:00. It’s so nice to have longer days! After the clocks change on Sunday, sunset will be at 19:40 and it will still be light for about an hour after that – great!!

On Saturday we walked around the centre of Tromsø for a bit. These kids were completely fascinated by the pigeons eating some bread! They were trying to come closer and closer without scaring the birds, their concentration was fun to watch! The second photo is taken from the top of the main square. It was snowing quite heavily while in the background the sun was shining on the mountains, very pretty. 

 

We’ve been having LOTS of snow lately! Here you can see what Paul’s bike looks like now… completely covered in snow 🙂  

Today we went for a walk around the beach on Håkøya, an island near Tromsø. I took a lot of photos, and I was planning to put them here tonight, but it has gotten a bit late now, I need my sleep 😉 I hope to add them tomorrow, though I also have an essay to write for my Norwegian class (I feel like being back at primary school, the essay has to be about my family!). 

Last Saturday it was quite a sunny day, and Paul skied up Stor-Kjølen. This is a mountain on Kvaløya that overlooks Tromsø. It’s 790 m high and has some kind of radar dome on top. 

There were quite a few people around the “football”, some of them skied up from the road to Skullsfjord the way he did, and some took a gentler, more circuitous route from the main road along the coast. Here you can see the building at the top:

And this is the view from the top towards Tromsø island:

On Sunday the weather was quite bad with temperatures above zero and rain! We decided to go for a drive anyway, and drove to Ringvassøya, an island near Tromsø. At some point the road climbs up, and almost immediately the rain turned into snow and the landscape was much prettier. We had a nice view over Skogfjordsvatnet, it’s a massive lake – more than 10 km long and about 2 km wide. It’s frozen and covered in snow, a perfect flat white area, you can see it in the panorama image below. Paul climbed in a tree to take that photo! He also managed to loose his glasses in the tree, so we had to go back there to find them. They are the exact same colour as the branches, so it was very hard to see, but we did find them back fortunately. 

  

We drove down to the lake, and decided to walk to one of the islands in it. How often can you walk to an island? 😉 Here we started walking on Skogfjordsvatnet. The sun tried to come out for a while, but it didn’t really succeed unfortunately…

We saw a family coming back from a skitrip, it was impressive seeing these tiny figures in the distance…. Paul took this nice panorama where you can see them:

The sky was about the same colour as the snow, and it was hard to see any contrast. In the photos below we are actually standing in front of the island, behind us is a hill covered in snow. You can’t see it though! It’s like a perfect studio background, completely white 🙂 Good for portraits!

To our surprise, most of the island was free of snow, and had mosses and small plants growing on it. It smelt like summer!! It didn’t look like it though, there was still a lot of ice/snow around.

 

On the way back, we stopped at the fjord. The water was like glass, and I tried to get a photo of that. But boys being boys, Paul felt the urgent need to keep throwing rocks in the water 😉 I gave up trying to stop him and just took photos of him skipping stones – have to try it again in sunny weather, as the result is quite nice!

The weather has gotten a lot worse, today we had very strong wind and a lot of rain. Fortunately the rain turned into snow this evening. On our trip on Sunday I saw the first signs of spring (new twigs on some trees), I was hoping for Spring to come early but I guess not 😉