Dog – gone it

After Bergen we had a sea day. There were lots of lectures to attend. The ship’s historian did a tour of the art work on all the landings. These are enlarged photos of the Bayeau Tapestry and he explained the story that they told.

We had another shot at seeing the Northern Lights while we sailed, but it did not happen this evening.

In the morning we were in Narvik. This is a town of about 14,500 inhabitants. It was founded around 1900 because of commerce. There is huge iron mining in Sweden at Kiruna, which is about 150 kilometers from Narvik. Since Narvik is a port whose waters never freeze due to the Gulf Stream, the Swedes use this port to send their ore to most of Europe and also to Asia. They move about 25 million tons of iron ore yearly.

The polar night lasts from December 6 to January 9 – this means the sun does not rise above the horizon for that time. It does get twilight for those days. The days of the midnight sun – no darkness – last from May 25 to July 20. I think you have to be a hardy person to go through these extremes.

The highlight of our day was our excursion to go dog sledding. We had to drive away from the coast for almost 2 hours. The scenery along the way was beautiful. Snow covered mountains, frozen lakes and rivers and amazing vistas wherever we looked. The dogs are Siberian huskies. They are smaller and colored differently from the Alaskan huskies which we normally see. The ride was fun. After we got to see the 4 month old babies who were friendly. Soup and hot chocolate was served and then we traveled back to the ship.

Dinner was at the Chef’s Table restaurant on board. It was a 5 course Scandinavian menu with wine served for each course.

We did get another viewing of the lights this night. Very cold on deck, but Bob again got great photos. Bette is still zero in photography.

Again, wifi not strong enough to share photos. Will try at a later time.