This travel update is part two of our week in Longyearbyen, Norway. It covers July 27. “Any text in quotes and Italics has been copied and pasted from some informational website like Wikipedia.”

July 27, 2023 – Thursday: Getting to know Longyearbyen

One of the reasons we wanted to come to Longyearbyen is that we wanted to experience the 24 hours of daylight that we’ve heard about. Last night I closed the blinds in our bedroom and closed our door to simulate darkness, so we could sleep better. I left the window blind in the living room open. When I got up to go to the bathroom during the “night” I looked out the living room window to see broad daylight. The sun really is up all the time here right now. It moves around the horizon, making a complete circle every 24 hours, and stays about 20 degrees above the horizon all the time.

I wanted to try to get some pictures of the sun as it went around Longyearbyen but it is frequently cloudy here so I may not be able to get my own “midnight sun” series, but here’s a sample from one of the Norwegian cruise ships. In this picture the sun dipped a little lower around midnight.

Here’s another one from a different website.

You get the idea. Today as we walked around we kept looking at the sun’s position. It didn’t seem to rise or dip much, just stayed up and moved around the horizon.

The first thing we wanted to do today was check out the local grocery store so we walked across the street to the Svalbardbutikken which is a Coop grocery store, the only large grocery store in Longyearbyen. It’s a nice, modern store with all the foods that we saw at the Coops in Oslo. Here’s Patti with the bananas.

Next to Coop is a nice, modern shopping mall for us tourists with everything we might desire to buy.

So, even though the outdoors here looks pretty rugged, the buildings inside are modern, clean, and well stocked.

We bought some groceries at Coop and also lunch. There’s a nice hot bar where I got lasagna and vegetables and Patti got some penne pasta with spinach. We took our plunder back home to eat.

After lunch we went out for a walk. There are a lot of Barnacle Geese around here with chicks. We’ve never seen Barnacle Geese before.

“The barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) is a species of goose that belongs to the genus Branta of black geese, which contains species with largely black plumage, distinguishing them from the grey Anser species. Despite its superficial similarity to the brant goose, genetic analysis has shown it is an eastern derivative of the cackling goose lineage.”

There’s a funny myth about how they got their name.

“The barnacle myth can be dated back to at least the 12th century. Gerald of Wales claimed to have seen these birds hanging down from pieces of timber, William Turner accepted the theory, and John Gerard claimed to have seen the birds emerging from their shells. The legend persisted until the end of the 18th century. In County Kerry, until relatively recently, Catholics abstaining from meat during Lent could still eat this bird because it was considered as fish.”

We’ve heard that the Barnacle Geese spend their summers here in Svalbard and the winters in the British Isles.

Here’s a view of the valley the town is in, looking up the valley from town. There are a lot of old wooden structures that I think are left over from the coal mining era.

We went to the Tourist Information Center and talked to a girl there about booking tours and she set us up on one of their computers. We spent about 30 minutes investigating various options and ended up booking a boat cruise to the terminus of a glacier and two glacier hikes. After that we walked down main street and looked at some of the shops and restaurants then went back home. I changed into my jogging clothes and went for a jog up the valley and saw this reindeer.

That was fun. We’ve read that the Svalbard reindeer are a little different from other reindeer in Norway in that they’re better adapted to extreme cold with shorter legs and thicker coats.

When it was time for bed I closed the bedroom blinds again and we got a good night’s sleep.

Future Plans

• We are currently staying at an Arbnb in Longyearbyen.
• August 2: We fly SAS Airlines from Longyearbyen to Tromsø.
• August 2 – 10: We reserved an Airbnb in Tomsø.
• After Tromsø, we may head south down the coast of Norway, making reservations as we travel along.
• October 17 – December 3: No plans yet.
• December 3 – 9: I will be participating in research in Durham, North Carolina, at the Med-El facilities there. Med-El is the company that made my Cochlear Implant. I’ll spend 9am to 4pm for five days being a lab rat. They say they will test various new programming options for my cochlear implant with the goal of improving their systems. It should be fun. I’m looking forward to it.
• December 9: We drive to Bradenton, Florida
• December 9 – 31: We reserved a cabin at Horseshoe Cove RV Park in Bradenton, Florida, where we stayed last year for two months (November and December). We look forward to singing in the Christmas Choir again.

2024

• January through April: We plan to travel through Belize, Costa Rica, and Panama. We don’t have reservations yet.
• May and June: We reserved a cabin at Horseshoe Cove RV Park in Bradenton, Florida. We’ll spend these two months getting our yearly medical stuff done and visiting with family and friends. May and June are “off-season” in the Sarasota / Bradenton area, and the rate is $56 per night for these 61 days, which is pretty good for a place like this in this location. In season, January through March, the price doubles.
• After June 30, we have no plans, but we are entertaining options about where to travel next summer. Maybe Germany/Austria/Switzerland.