Up to the Arctic Circle

The holiday started with a Sunday morning flight from Manchester to Tromso in the Arctic Circle. Arriving mid-afternoon in a cold, grey and snowy Tromso, we settled ourselves into our hotel room then dressed for the cold and went for a stroll. By now it was late afternoon and the temperature was staring to plummet, consequently it was not long before we found a pub for warmth and liquid refreshment.

 
Tromso is the largest city in Northern Norway with a population of 71,000, 11,000 of which are students. Here there are reputedly more bars per person than anywhere else in Norway and the city has the nickname of 'Paris of the North'. It is also known as the 'Gateway to the Arctic' as many of the Arctic expeditions originated here. Today fishing is of prime importance and it's most interesting landmark is the famous architectural masterpiece - the Arctic Cathedral, which was built in 1965, and has northern Europe's largest stained glass window.

Monday morning dawned bright, sunny and cold and we took ourselves out to do some more exploring before joining a guided walking tour, which took us round some points of historical interest before concluding in Tromso's oldest pub where we sampled beer from the world's northern most brewery, Mack. Finally we had a quick walk in a snowstorm to join the cruise ship which was to be our home for the next three nights.

When the ship left Tromso heading north, in the early evening, all was calm, but as evening turned tonight the weather became wilder as we sailed through a violent storm with winds of gale force 12. We along with many other passengers did not have much sleep that night. By Tuesday morning the storm had blown itself out  and we docked in the small port of Honningsvag as scheduled. However, despite the clear blue skies and sun, our planned excursion to the North Cape was cancelled as the night's storm had left the roads impassable. Instead we went ashore at Honningsvag to have a look around. Here the air was very cold, clear and invigorating which we only very rarely experience in the UK. About a foot of snow had fallen overnight and husband enjoyed himself immensely watching the snowploughs clear the snow into the harbour. There were a few shops open mainly selling Christmas paraphernalia - late for 2013 or early for 2014?

Thankfully Tuesday night was calmer and after a good night's sleep we were up early for our morning's excursion  to the Russian border. The ship docked at Kirkenes (pronounced chickness) the only town in Norway where East meets West. Our coach journey to the border station of Storskog took us through some grim

but stark

and stunning scenery.

 At the border

we were allowed to take photographs

 and buy souvenirs, which were mainly Russian priced in Norwegian krone, but we were not allowed over the  border into Russia and nobody made a run for it.

On the return journey to Kirkenes we stopped on Prestfjellet Mountain for this photo opportunity of the port and the waiting cruise ship.

Alternatively some of our fellow travelers had opted to visit the Snow Hotel, but we decided that the Russian border would be more interesting. Others left the ship at Kirkenes to spend a night in the Snow Hotel before returning home. The temperature there is sub-zero and I like my comforts. Even a rocking bed is preferable to a cold one.

By lunchtime we were back on board the ship. At this point it turned around and we began the return journey south to Tromso. Around 4 pm that afternoon the ship docked briefly at Vardo the most easterly town/port in Norway. Here some very brave or foolish soles went ice dipping in the Barents Sea. We went ashore to stretch our legs and even dressed for the weather this was quite the coldest place that we visited.

That evening we had just begun our starter at dinner when an announcement was made over the tanoy system that the Northern Lights had been sighted in the sky. On hearing this 90% of diners put down their soup spoon and rushed to view this phenomenon. We finished out soup before joining our fellow passengers. There were some faint green smudges in the sky- nothing like the photographs that you see promoting the Northern Lights.
 
Our third and final night on board the cruise ship was again rough although not quite as bad as the first  night. Just winds of gale force 9 this time. Well one night's sleep out of three isn't bad is it? After the first night I had resigned myself to not having much sleep this holiday. What amazed me was that some passengers slept right through these stormy nights oblivious to the mayhem outside.

Our final port of call on Thursday morning was Hammerfest- the world's most northern town.

Here it was noticeably warmer, but sleet was falling from the leaden skies. We had a short stroll to this unusual church

then visited the Polar Bear Society museum.

Back on board the cruise ship we spent our final afternoon sailing on calm grey water through the dramatic black and white scenery of the fjords.

Shortly before midnight the ship docked back in Tromso and our cruise was over. The final night of our holiday was spent back on terra firma in the same hotel that we had spent our first night.

The whole trip was a new experience for us. We did not see the Northern Lights in all their glory which was the initial objective of the holiday and we are not sure that cruising is for us. The cabin was small or perhaps cozy, with foldaway beds that I had expected and an ensuite the size of a broom cupboard.  We did not expect this particular cruise to be luxurious, but had higher expectations of it. If we are to cruise again we would definitely expect something of a higher standard and it would need to be a much larger cruise ship.

Journey into the unknown

Well the last few days have been very different and interesting and for us the experience of a lifetime, as we shall not be doing it again. I am surprised as anybody that I am back in one piece. The holiday was booked last April then forgotten about. We usually book holidays at the last minute, but as our attempt to book this trip at the last minute in 2013 met with failure, we realised that this was one holiday that we had to book in advance.

The tickets for the holiday arrived around the time that the Malaysian airlines plane MH370 disappeared. Our flight was with a chartered airline that we had never heard of. There was no trace of the flight on Manchester airport's website. And to make it even more sinister we could not check in in advance via the website, as we normally do. Maybe it is just my suspicious mind, but I felt that we could disappear and no one would know. On our outbound flight we had the shakiest take off and nerve racking landing that I can ever remember in nearly forty years of flying.

Then we spent a night in an hotel not far from this building site,

where this character occupied a corner of the hotel's reception area.

The following three nights were spent on a small cruise ship. Our first night at sea was very stormy and uncomfortable. The second night was calm, but the third night was only marginally less uncomfortable than the first night. The final night of our holiday was spent back in the hotel where we had spent the first night. Thankfully the return flight was uneventful. We along with most of our fellow travelers thought that we were going on a holiday, but it turned out to be more of an endurance test. In my next post I shall fill in the details.

Watch this space

When I stopped writing my blog at the end of February last year I had plans for what I intended to do with the time that I had been spending on my blog. Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond my control, the British weather in the shape of last year's Arctic Spring, prevented me from putting my plans into action. My plans can not be carried out this year for different reasons. I wont bore you with the details. So I have decide to return to blogging.

The last year has been different irrespective of my absence from Blogland. There have been good experiences and not so good experiences and I am now looking forward to sharing some of them with you. But before I return to blogging we have a holiday, which has been booked for almost a year, to take next week. I not going to say where we are going, but if our flight should disappear we are going to end up in the icy waters of the North Sea rather than the balmy Indian Ocean.

Taking a leaf out of Benedict's book

My first thought when I saw a blog post on Shrove Tuesday asking what I was going to give up for Lent was - my blog. That day my laptop had been impossible and trying to continue with my blog was looking to be a lost cause. Over the last few months I have given a considerable amount of thought to whether or not to continue with my blog and I have decided that I have done as much with it as I can. It is not a matter of poor health, although I have had a cold for the last few days. I do not intend to go into a monastery or even a nunnery, but shall be spending some time in our garden and I have other interests that I would like to devote more time to. Unfortunately there are not enough hours in the day for me to pursue all of the interests that I would like to and recently I have been unable to spend as much time on my blog as I would like. At the moment I am not sure if this will be permanent or maybe just a sabbatical. Blogland has changed in the time that I have been blogging. Many of the bloggers that I cut my blogging teeth with, no longer blog. Sadly some are no longer with us. Blogging has  been an immensely enjoyable experience through which I have learned a lot from people, about people and about myself. I shall keep an eye on Blogland and may even leave the occasional comment but at the moment I have no plans to write posts.

And finally to borrow from Benedict's last address - Thank you for your friendship.

Ring ring

Always keen to get things sorted and move on, I spoke too soon about our telephone/broadband problems being sorted, when I published my previous post.

The afternoon, that the new master socket was  installed in the study, was very cold and wet. I had been to he hairdressers in the morning so was not keen to hang around outside looking at wiring or watching what the engineer was doing. He was in and out of the cottage and I was happy to leave him to it, as long as he shut the door, as the previous weekend we had had a mouse in the utility room. He did explain to me what he would be doing but deciphering telephone engineer tech speak is not my strong point.

The old master socket was in our bedroom. Don't ask why. A previous owner had it installed there.Then you have to take in account that our cottage was originally two cottages. It looks to us as if there were two telephone lines at some point in the past, but now all the telephone points, that we have, are on the one line. When they work we have a total of seven telephone points, but we have never used all of them. The cottage had five telephone points when we moved here and we have added another two in locations where we wanted them. Most of the time we have four phones around the house with only one set to ring. However, recently two, including the one set to ring, stopped working. It took us a bit of time to work this out. Both went out and I purchased a cheap replacement from Argos until we get around to sorting things out properly. At least it rings when it is plugged in. I have to admit that I unplug it when we go to bed and do not plug it it until after breakfast the next morning. That is the legacy of numerous unreasonably timed and unwanted calls. So I expect you are wondering what the problem is. Shortly after I had published the previous post I picked up the answerphone handset which is not set to ring, to answer a call only to find that the other phone continued to ring and I had to pick up the ringing phone to answer the call. This has happened before. So I did not think that it was too unusual. Shortly afterwards I tried to make a phone call from the answerphone handset, but there was no dialing tone. I thought that we had another broken phone. I mentioned this to husband when he came home. He soon worked out that the BT engineer had taken away the wiring from he old master socket and the point, that the answerphone is plugged into in our hall, is wired from the old master socket. Hence we now have three sockets that do not work and no messages on our answerphone!

Husband was not terribly surprised to discover this and it should be easier and more economical to ask our electrician to sort out the wiring. When we approached him about our broadband problems last December he could have come the following week, but it was not convenient with us. Now he is booked up for weeks and we are going to have to wait for him to find the time to fit us in. For the moment the answerphone is plugged in to one of the working telephone points which is not as conveniently located as the hall, so I have to remember to look at it from time to time.

Life in the doldrums

We rely so much on computers now. They have taken over our lives and now living without one has become difficult, restricting and at times tedious, but life has to go on regardless. Well, I have not actually been living without a computer for the last two months but our broadband speed had dropped so low that some days connecting to the Internet was impossible. That always seemed to happen on days when I really needed to use the computer. It would wouldn't it. Thankfully all that changed a week ago when the problem was fixed. I did not rush back to my blog straight away as the BT (British Telecom) engineer said that it might take a week or two for the broadband speed to stabilise and I wanted to be sure that there would be no further problems. So here I am with fingers crossed that there will be no further problems.

Having in laws to visit is not all bad. Husband’s sister and his  brother in law (BIL) came on Boxing Day. During the day the conversation inevitably turned to the thorny subject of our broadband problem. BIL volunteered that their broadband problem had been solved by having BT move their master telephone socket into the study and he was even able to quote the price. The next day husband phoned up BT and arranged for our master socket to be moved. The only problem being that they could not do the work until the end of January. I had suggested this as being a better solution to our problem than having to take up floor boards and three carpets, but BIL’s advice obviously carries more weight than mine as my suggestion fell on deaf ears.

Entertaining over, on 27 December I took down our Christmas tree and decorations and on 29 December we joined the jet set and flew off to Valletta in Malta for New Year. Not the real ‘jet set’ I know but we flew with easyJet. Malta was warm and sunny and a definite improvement on a cold and wet Chester. We were staying in the old walled city of Valletta, a designated World Heritage Site. Our first day was spent exploring its' sights and enjoying the sun.

The second day which was New Year's Eve, we caught a bus with the intention of going to St Julian's but missed the stop and ended up at the small resort of Golden Bay on the other side of the island!

Luckily there was a restaurant there where we had a bite to eat. We did not have to wait long for a bus back to Valletta and by mid afternoon we were back there. Now we needed to book a table at a restaurant for our evening meal. By a stroke of luck we managed to find a restaurant that had just had a cancellation. It was New Year's Eve so the cost was astronomical and we had to pay a hefty deposit. Walking back to our hotel we noticed stalls being set up in preparation for the evening's festivities. We need not to have worried about going hungry that evening, as we could have feasted on hot dogs, pizzas and soft drinks from the stalls, for a fraction of the price that we were to pay for our meal. Then there was this stall of pastries which were very tempting.

Our three day break was over all too quickly and before we knew it we were back in damp England. It was a pleasant break and we shall probably do it again as we now have very few family ties and only have to suit ourselves.

So we were  back to the mundane and humdrum of life in January. Short, cold, grey days and the remnants of the January sales. Before being plunged into the full horrors of a freezing British January we were lucky enough to have a few mild days which allowed us to get out into the garden and finish off some of the  Autumn jobs that had not been done. Then we had a spell of very wet weather before the cold snap set in. And for a few days this was the view from the kitchen window.

It looks very pretty I know. It was also very cold. Thankfully it did not last very long. Because it rarely does go on for more than a week, we are really not geared up for it in this country. Now we are back to grey, wet and muddy. We are never happy with the weather that we get.

It is now a year since I retired and life has settled into a bit of a routine. Things have not gone to plan. They rarely do and I know that the routine will not last for long. This term's flower arranging class, which is run through the local adult education college, will be the last as the teacher has grown weary of the red tape which working through the college involves. Whilst working I relied on my trusty osteopath to keep my creaking back in working order and have continued to go to her on a less regular basis since I retired. Last month she calmly announced that she will be retiring at he end of this month. Recent visits have been a bit of a luxury so I shall try to manage without her, but I shall miss her. Then last week my hairdresser told me that she was leaving to go to a salon on the other side of Chester. A first I was dismayed, but now that I have given the matter some thought I plan to try one of the other hairdressers at the usual place, as it is convenient and I really do not want to have to travel across Chester. She may have even done me a favour as she has been at bit erratic recently. This week I had a letter from my dental surgery cancelling my next check up appointment - my hygienist is leaving, which is not so bad, but you do get used to people. As I said earlier, life has to go on. Most of us do not like change but sometimes it can be good for us. There will be a new flower arranging teacher and maybe a different hairdresser will be better than the last one.