Two weeks ago we decided to take a daytrip to Vannøya, an island north of Tromsø. It had been snowing during the night and driving conditions on some stretches were really tough – luckily we hadn’t changed to summer tires yet! The weather improved during the day so the view on the drive back was completely different…

After arriving on the island, our first stop was Torsvåg. I really wanted to visit Torsvåg as the lighthouse there is one of our measurement stations as well as a dividing place for our wind warnings, and I had never been there before. The lighthouse is quite special, it’s integrated into a house. Nobody seemed to live there though… I would have liked to visit, but there was nobody there.

Nearby we found this small pier with a railroad on it…

There were also lots of snow buntings around. You can read a nice article about them here.

Torsvåg seen from the pier – lots of fishing boats and a few fish farms. It was Sunday so all the boats were in port, and only some keen people were out in rented boats (one of them carrying a huge Russian flag :D).

After visiting Torsvåg, we drove to the settlement of Burøysund, on the other side of the island. Quite a sleepy place…

Back on the western side of the island, we visited the enormous beach at Sandbukta – really pretty!

There were some old boathouses near the beach…

We continued exploring the island and drove to the “capital” Vannvåg. A fishing boat had just come in and there were LOTS of seagulls around.

Finally we reached the end of the road at Kristoffervalen. We had a nice lunchbreak in this little harbour :).

Nearby they were storing parts of windturbines that are about to be built. They’re building a wind farm with 18 turbines at Fakken. The turbines come from Italy and were stored on the quay – impressive to see how big the blades are!!

Here are the first 3 turbines, and in the foreground the container houses that I assume are used for housing employees. Nobody seemed to be around now though.

We decided to go for a little walk along the coast. It was warm enough to walk without a coat, and with the lack of snow in this area, it almost felt like summer 🙂 Strange when you think that we were driving through snow showers in the morning!

We walked to a small settlement – what an idyllic place. If you keep walking, you get to an (at least partly) abandoned fishing village, but we didn’t have time to walk that far. Next time!

There were lots of birds around, I wish I had a better lens to capture them 🙂 I think this is a redshank (rødstilk in Norwegian, tureluur in Dutch) – but please correct me if I’m wrong!

Nice reflections in the evening light… and later on, back in the car and on the way to the ferry, we had a nice view of Nord Fugløya, a bird island that Paul hopes to visit 🙂

Waiting for the ferry back…

It was a fantastic day and I really liked Vannøya – would really like to come back in summer and explore more 🙂

We haven’t been on many trips since then, the weather has been really miserable. And when it wasn’t, I was at work. Paul did go on a really nice trip on the 17th of May, to Nord Kvaløya – see his photos here. It will be June very soon, but this was the view from our living room today… (and for the optimists who think we do have green grass – nope, it’s artificial :D). Waiting for better times…