Taken when we arrived. The clouds have now cleared.
Every blog I have read of people motorhoming around northern Norway in summer has, at some point, reported incidents of unintentionally late nights when the continuous daylight has caused them to fail to realise that bedtime has been and gone. I was interested to see if this could possibly happen to me as I am an early-to-bed sort of person, who is quite fond of sleep.
As it turns out, the sun being high in the sky can fool my body clock too. I'm typing this at approaching 2030, yet it feels like late afternoon. As a result, our evening meal is often a couple of hours later than we would have it at home and bedtime has shifted back accordingly.
We've still been getting up reasonably early (0730) most days, but today wasn't most days and I lounged around in bed, initially listening to rain, then contemplating going out for a walk. Laziness won out in the end.
Bodø was our destination today. More particularly the Air Museum, which proved to be an afternoon very well spent. At £15 a head it's not a cheap one, but even I (i.e. the not-a-plane-geek) was thoroughly impressed with their displays. I certainly didn't expect so many planes inside:
The military wing of the building
And the civil wing
The view from the control tower was good too
Throughout, the history of Norwegian aviation was told, with an interactive section at the end explaining some of the science behind flight.
My only gripe concerned the car park, which requires you to guess, before you've set foot inside, how long you are going to be. The first three hours are free (you still have to get a Pay & Display ticket, you just dont have to pay for it) and not wanting to pay £2.20+/hour unnecessarily, we just went for the freebie ticket. The problem is that, when I went out to buy an extra hour when the original ticket expired, I discovered that you can't just buy an hour - a paid hour comes with three free hours and we had already had our free time. Given the choice between just taking another free ticket and hoping a warden hadn't been around noting numbers, or paying and getting four hours, I did the honest thing and paid. Later I heard the receptionist in the museum advising a German couple to just get another free ticket. Hey ho.
After a thoroughly enjoyable and educational afternoon, we had but a short drive, with our night stop being just 3 miles away. As the photo at the top shows, it has a spectacular view and, facing west, is a good location to witness the midnight sun (provided it doesn't cloud back in!).
It seems like we arrived, and nabbed a spot with a view, just in the nick of time as it has turned out to be a very popular place for running and walking. As working hours finished, so the car park filled up around us. There are still lots of people coming and going and my usual theory of "It'll quieten down once it gets dark" won't work here!
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