European Winter Escapade 2019 - Part Eleven - Tromso Photos

Even though we were north of the Arctic Circle and it was dark virtually the whole day, that didn't stop us from taking pictures!

Is it 9 in the morning or 4 in the afternoon?

It all looked the same

I did NOT try these!

European Winter Escapade 2019 - Part Ten - A Finale Falls Flat

We finally did get out on our Northern Lights tour. And since I am writing this in the airline lounge in Salt Lake City waiting for our last flight home, I am not going to be as verbose as I was going to.

Here is it in a nutshell. The Northern Lights, seen with the naked eye, look a lot different than they do when one takes a picture of them. All those colors? They are just sort of grey. Unless you are extremely lucky to get the lights on a particularly spectacular day. Of those on our tour, about 2/3rds were photographers. They actually had a pretty good time. Our guide was quite attentive in getting them the shots they needed and helping them adjust. Most of them were happily shooting away for hours.

Those of us who didn't have cameras or weren't into that kind of photography pretty much were done after about 30 minutes. Fortunately, it wasn't horribly cold. But still, after about an hour, that 1/3rd of us were huddling by a fire the guide had built trying to stay warm and amuse ourselves. Finally, even all but two of the photographers were done and we had to wait another long-time before the guide thought we'd got our money's worth and would take us back to the van. Oh and I fail to mention that we went down this steep snow-covered bank to the waterside for the final pictures that were really challenging to our balance. Going up at the end was worse.

I am not quite sure how the whole 'Northern Lights Tourism Industry' has kept this information that most of what you see with your eyes is not what is seen in a photograph so quiet. We certainly did not run into that information as we did our research. I think the thing that really put an exclamation point on the experience was a conversation we had with your Somali immigrant cab driver back to the airport. Asked if he had ever seen colored Northern Lights. He extolled about an amazing experience where the whole sky and the town itself were green from the lights...once...in 8 years!

We were back at the hotel at 1 AM so were able to get a bit of sleep before we took off the next morning. A final Norwegian insult...I had currency I wanted to change into dollars. There is no currency exchange at the airport. This is a small but busy airport with lots of foreign visitors coming in. One would think a currency exchange would be practical. There were machines for changing currency but they only took one size of bill...not the size I had.

We flew to Paris where we stayed the night before returning today. At the airport hotel, we had a very acceptable meal with appetizer, two mains, four drinks and two desserts for half of what we had paid in Tromso. And it tasted good.

Put Norway on the list of places we will not be going back to.

European Winter Escapade 2019 - Part Eight - That Darkness Is Not Just The Arctic Winter...It Is Our Souls

#2 and I were reflecting last night as we drank tea and ate potato chips in the hotel lobby instead of chasing after the Northern Lights, that if you travel you are going to have disappointments. (I guess if you do anything, there is the chance of disappointment.)  Of course, if you don't travel often and you have a disappointment that proportionally is a much bigger deal. As the #2's and we travel a butt-ton, the number of disappointments is actually pretty small. But count our first 30 hours in Tromso as a MAJOR disappointment.

We can start with the weather. We had geared up shopping like crazy for the 'Arctic' experience. It does not look like it will go below freezing the whole time we are in Tromso. It rained all morning which meant even going out and taking pictures was pretty much squashed. There is no snow on the ground. It is dark all the time so I will grant you that.

Let's go on to the hotel.  Our initial room had a bed so small that I refused the room and asked to change to two single beds. It is a major US brand but is always understaffed even though it is a big hotel with a ton of traffic. The understaffing seems to be something of a standard operating procedure here. Its main draw bar on the upper floor with a view is closed all day on Sunday. The restaurant is not open for lunch on Sunday.

Moving on to restaurants, the food has been uniformly poor, service poor and terribly expensive. I had been warned that Norway was expensive. But honestly, the two meals we ate out so far were just about as much money as I have spent per person on a meal in a decade...especially since they were not good. It is not just a point of the flavors, representing local cuisine tendencies, are not to our liking (they are not) but the execution is just not there.

On Saturday when we arrived, 2B had lined us up for what was purported to be one of the better restaurants. We chose the four-course menu. The food lacked any of the basic flavor bases that really highlight any dish - salt, acidity, umami. They were uniformly bland and flat. The service was terrible (#3/3A you would feel right at home) with only 2 servers managing a whole dining room.  It was easily 30 to 40 minutes between courses while the chairs were hard wood which made sitting and waiting really uncomfortable. We had to get up and walk around just to ease the pain on our arthritic hips. Then the management had pulled a bit of a bait and switch on a wine. We ordered a bit of a splurge wine, a wine that I new specifically, that was from a very good vintage. The price was up there but not more than I would pay in the U.S. for the same. But the bottle that came out was from a different vintage than that advertised. When the wine was poured for tasting, we noticed right away that it was a shadow of what such a wine should be. 2B checked out the vintage on his phone and sure enough, the vintage was a particularly poor vintage for that region. He also had a view of the wine storage area from his seat and noted there were 6 more bottles of this 'replacement' vintage. So they were listing a premium wine on their menu and swapping out one that was selling retail at half the value. I was pissed. This whole fiasco set us back $500.

I will not say much about our second meal out (which took us almost an hour and a half to find) because so many places were closed on Sunday or only offering a fixed menu with either salt cod or smoked reindeer as the dishes), but if the sound of boiled, salted lamb ribs does not sound appealing to you, then you are with the four of us who equally did not find it very appealing. This meal - four entrees, three soups, two soft drinks, two coffees and two beers - only set us back $250.

And to top our day off, as we were getting all our gear on for our all-night trip to see the Northern Lights - our only reason for coming - 2B got an email from the guide saying that all the routes he takes were looking like they would be cloudy so he was calling off the trip and refunding our money. This didn't surprise me as I had looked at the regional weather which did not look good. Honestly, all of us but 2B were pleased that the guide was honest and didn't take our money to schlepp for hours and hours to see nothing. But it was a bummer nonetheless.

We will have one more chance tonight.

European Winter Escapade 2019 - Part Six - If It Is Dark, It Must Be Tromso

Tromso, Norway, third-largest city in the world north of the Arctic Circle. We are here in search of the Northern Lights.

We arrived yesterday, taking most of the day for us to get here. It is dark. At this latitude, sunrise and sunset are only 20 minutes apart. Oddly enough it is not that cold temperature-wise. It is above freezing. In the city, most of the snow from earlier has melted. However, there is a very strong wind and it is raining so is very uncomfortable.  In my clothing preparation, I had planned extensively for below freezing and snow. I don't really have the right gear for wind and rain.

Our main purpose, however, is to go on two nights of touring with an experienced Northern Lights guide. We will be out for 6 to 10 hours each night, driving inland to try and find an open sky to see the occurrence. The weather forecast for here in Tromso is for non-stop clouds, rain and snow for the few days we are here. However, our guide says that we should be prepared to bring our passports for we may be driving as far as Sweden and Finland (whose borders are close by) to find the Lights.

I have looked on the map and there is a long line of mountains that make up most of Norway. However, as you move east and go towards the other countries, you get beyond the mountains and into flatter land. I am hoping that perhaps the mountains act as a weather barrier keeping the moisture and clouds on the west side and opening things up on the east side. We will see.

In the meantime, I have a lot of pictures that I took during our time in Amsterdam and need to get them edited and posted.