Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

This week has been wonderful 🙂 On Monday afternoon it cleared up completely, and we decided to test our new tent at Telegrafbukta. We bought a Mountain Hardwear EV3, which we found on sale for 50% – quite a bargain. It’s a light but spacious tent, we are planning to use it for hiking trips.

This tent is a bit different from most tents: it only has one layer. It seems really strong though, and it’s easy to set up. And I love the little windows 🙂

We had a nice bbq, and watched a beautiful sunset…

The weather stayed good for the rest of the week, very sunny though we often had fog. I love fog 🙂 I took LOTS of photos, so check back soon!

Last Tuesday was really sunny, and I took my camera on a little trip before my afternoon shift. These photos are taken at Folkeparken, the park close to where we live. It’s an open air museum with lots of old buildings (that have been moved here), which only opens on sundays during the summer for a couple of hours – and even then, only 3 of the buildings are open 😀 It’s very nice though, but I wish they would open more frequently – especially the nice little cafe!

There is an exhibition about fishing called “In Cod We Trust” :D. Of course I had to take some photos of my favourite boat house…

And another cluster of buildings on the other side of the road. The grass roofs are so pretty now, they had lots of purple flowers in them.

A girl was fishing from the end of the jetty (wonder if she caught anything, we never had much luck there), and lots of families were enjoying the beach of Telegrafbukta.

My next stop was Tisnes, a small village about half an hour from Tromsø, with some nice beaches to walk on.

There’s also an impressive shipwreck on the beach, which is always great for photos 🙂

A very nice morning! This weekends looks grey and drizzly again, but next week the weather forecasts look really promising – and I’m free! Can’t wait to take my camera on some more trips 🙂

July in Tromsø wasn’t very nice, except for the few sunny days at the beginning of the month. The rest of the month was cold (10.7 C on average), rainy (it rained for 28 days!) and very grey (zero days with clear skies, and only 118.4 hours of sunshine, which made it the least sunny July since 1995). Paul managed to escape to sunny and warm Finland for two weeks, but I was here every single day. I don’t mind clouds, but when you have weeks on end with low clouds obscuring the mountains, it becomes quite depressing.

ANYWAY! Paul came back last Friday, and we finally had a bit better weather on Sunday. I was so keen to get out, get some fresh air 🙂 We decided to drive along the outer coast of Kvaløya, and our first stop was at Småbakken, a small grassy beach at the bottom of Store Blåmann.

The next stop was Grøtfjord, a really nice beach. There is a sauna in a barrel-shaped building there, and there were some people in the hot tub next to it. Just when we were walking on the beach, they decided to go for a swim 😀 BRRRR!!

We then drove on to Rekvik, a small village at the end of the road. There are two jetties there, one of them is about to fall apart and very photogenic 😉

After enjoying warm lakes in Finland, I think Paul forgot how cold the water is here 😀

There was an area on the beach where a small stream bubbled up from underground, causing funny bubbles in the wet sand. The sand was moving so fast that by taking photos at 1/20th of a second, you could see the movement… so cool!

A nice house near the beach. The second photo is taken at the lake just above the village.

The road goes quite high up before it reaches Rekvik, and we got out at the highest point to go for a walk. They made a really nice picknick place there, what a view! 🙂

It’s been so wet that the mushrooms are out already, while the blueberries and cloudberries are not ripe yet. Last year we picked cloudberries in the middle of July…

We walked to the top of Brosmetinden, which is only a short walk from where we parked – but the path is quite steep and on the other side of the path is a very deep drop… The views from the top were very nice, and even the sun was coming out 🙂

In the photos below you can see Rekvik far below, the mountain just drops straight down. I didn’t stay near the edge for very long 😉

It was a very nice day and so good to be outside again. And even better: we FINALLY got summer weather the next day, the sun came out and it looks like it will stay sunny for the rest of the week. It’s not very warm, only about 12 degrees Celsius, but I don’t care 🙂 I’m at work all week, but went out to take photos this morning, so more soon!