Skip to main content

Sortland Norway

After a crazy rough night the ship docked at Sortland.   I looked on TripAdvisor And Sortland, to be honest didn't have a lot going for it.   It seems to be a good place to start hiking various trails, and the main attractions were well out of the city.  So really the big attraction here was the deep snow!! We slept late because of the bad night And we had a late breakfast.  Quite yummy eggs benedict in the pool side cafe.  We got very well wrapped up and headed into town. Sortland is known as the blue town as an artist, for a kind of giant Installation, had painted many of the buildings in various shades of blue.  While there were a lot of blue buildings It wasn't as evident as I thought it might be.  They were quite a lot of buildings that were dated 1800s But they still looked all shiny and new,  there were even more modern looking flat rooftop, office/ apartment blocks And while it wasn't unpleasant it wasn't particularly picturesque.  Although they did have a statue celebrating a local litter pickrer... how fab is that!!!
There was alot of snow - and lots of snow ploughs.... there were quite heavy snow showers - minus 3 degrees - we definetly felt like we were in the Arctic Circle. 
The snow was so heavy it became impossible to see the mountains surrounding the town. 
We mooched around...Dr Fred found a climbing wall... At this point we turned back down the main street and back to coffee and cake on the ship. 
We had a slow lazy aftrnoon and in the evening the 'official' stargazing was cancelled due to cloudy weather and unsafe deck conditions - we did the scale of the planets down the Lido deck but really people werent that interested

- they were baying for northern lights!!  ...but there were gaps in the clouds and sure enough some faint Aurora.  There wasnt much colour to it with the naked eye but some people got some quite good photos.... not me, I'm afraid, my camera just wont do it!!!  We were in and out on deck until about 1.00 am hoping the faint glow would expand into something more colourful - but the snow kept starting up and eventually  Dr Fred called it a night. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Caroline Mackay23 March 2025 at 21:44

    Ohh... Love the statue to the litter picker 😍 I'm off to a conference in Leeds on Tuesday evening... About litter picking!!! 😅 Rock and roll baby!!! 😂 And loving the vast quantities of snow, obvs!!! ❄️⛄❄️

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Vigo

We left the ship to explore Vigo. Its a much larger place then we expected... although tbh I hadn't given ut a lot of thought. Its a real mish mash of old and new and having got a map from tourist info we decided to follow the walking trail to the Monte Castro... the highest point of the town.  Most of the town was pretty much as everywhere else... lots of traffic... lots of people... one or two interesting buildings and a lot of shopping. We headed to the art gallery - this has been a year of gallery visits so we we seen o reason to change now.  The Museo de Marco is housed in the towns ex prison building and its very grand. In fact, I think that on this occaision the building might have been more interesting than the art....  Although the visiting exhibition by Susanne S D Themlitz was strangely compelling. It was a huge varied collection of eclectic items... found, salavaged, manipulated and arranged in lots of ways - weirdly inspiring - and mostly enjoyable to look at...
2 comments
Read more

verdant lushness

Its a never ending island hop... today we hopped of the boat at Kingstown, on the island St. Vincents and Grenadine. Once through the usual port duty free - cheap booze and diamonds to go milarkey we were straight into the town... crazy noisy smelly chaos... refreshingly no tat shops for tourists, just local markets and street traders all vying for local sales.  Music blasting from everywhere, cars (very battered and often very pimped) all over the roads - parked in the middle of the street, loading, unloading, chatting seemingly oblivious to the total traffic jam caused behind them...  We walked through this mayhem - the temperatures were rising probably about 30 degrees - tourists evident by trying to walk on the shady side of the street - even when we turned off the main drag and there were less people it was still like carnival time with music blasting everywhere. Its very atmospheric and mostly promotes a good vibe although I have heard '3 little birds' everywhich way a...
1 comment
Read more

Scotland part 2

The second half of the week continued in much the same vein.  We had one rainy afternoon which was actually quite nice to be holed up in the house with the rain lashing the windows.  It probably wasn't quite so nice for the two visitors that came on their bikes but they're tough cookies - and its only water- but I did feel sorry for them having to cycle six miles back down the track in the wind and rain, but given Scotland,  it wasn't as bad as it could be. The big quest for the 2nd half of the week was to find some deer antiers!  The chap that owned the house dropped in to visit - he was a very friendly fella and was chatting about how this was the time of year when all the Stags lost their antlers (he collected them and sold them) so after that we were on the serious lookout.   It's always been Fred's mission to find some dropped antlers....  The Monro baggers continued with the mission to bag the remaining three Monros... there is discussion as whet...
Post a Comment
Read more