This travel update is for part five of our two-week stay in Tromsø, Norway. It covers five days, August 7 through 11, 2023. “Any text in quotes and Italics has been copied and pasted from some informational website like Wikipedia.”

August 7, 2023 – Monday: Planning our next Move

We have to get serious now about what we’re going to do when we leave Tromsø, so this morning we walked into town to check out public transportation options. We want to go south, and it would be nice if we could spend a few nights in the Lofoten Islands, but we’re not sure how we’re going to do that.

On the way into town we walked by this garbage vacuum truck that sucks the small bags of garbage out of the underground tubes. I just think that’s an interesting method of garbage collection. We have small plastic bags in three different colors, purple is for plastic, green is for food waste, and blue is for paper and cardboard. You can see the large red tube coming out of the back of the truck and sucking out of the cement base.

We went to the combination terminal for cruise ships, coastal ferries, and long distance buses. There was a nice mosaic in the terminal called “The Gateway To The Arctic”. The motif is inspired by the Northern Lights.

We talked to a guy at one of the stores in the terminal and he helped us find more transportation information. We’re not sure if we’re going to leave Tromsø by plane, bus, or boat. We need to decide that this week.

Across from the terminal is the Clarion Hotel and we went in there to use the bathroom. We’ve found that the bathrooms at the bigger, fancier hotels are easier for us to use because we look like most of the tourists coming in and out and no one questions us. At the smaller hotels you sometimes have to try to sneak past the front desk in order to find the bathroom. Also, sometimes you see something unique, for example, the urinals at the Clarion were arranged in an artistic semicircle. I was tempted to try them all.

Then on the way home we stopped at a couple of grocery stores to get ingredients for one of our favorite meals, called “Mediterranean Pasta” ~ here’s Patti in the kitchen with the finished creation (whole wheat pasta, chicken or shrimp, capers, carrots, edamame or broccoli [whatever vegetable is available] tossed with olive oil, lemon juice and basil).

This afternoon we did some more planning for ongoing travel. One nice thing about this Airbnb is that we have a view of the fjord at the end of the road. Here’s one of the fancy Hurtigruten cruise ships as it passed our view. We’ve read that Hurtigruten runs a 12-day cruise that costs $5,000 per person. It’s a round trip from Bergen to Kirkenes and back. We’ve decided not to do a fancy cruise, since it’s outrageously expensive.

August 8, 2023 – Tuesday: More Planning

This morning we went for jogs around the southern end of the island. It was a beautiful day and we each ran about 5 miles. It was a pretty simple out and back path along the coastal road which has a nice pedestrian and bicycle paved pathway along it. It was nice to see the water and there were lots of other people out jogging and riding bicycles.

This afternoon and evening we worked on possible itineraries for driving a rental car around this northwest area of Norway. There are plenty of nice places to visit so we need to narrow it down to the places we most want to see, then determine how many nights to spend at each place. We’re thinking that we’ll rent the car at the Tromsø airport for a week or two, then drop it back off at the airport and fly to Trondheim. There was a large one-way fee for the rental car when we were thinking that we would drive it all the way to Trondheim. We can avoid that by just doing a loop down to the Lofoten Islands and back, then flying the inexpensive prop plane direct from Tromsø to Trondheim.

It was a very warm day here, it got up to 80°F! Lots of people were out sunbathing. We went out for a late afternoon walk and Patti cut my hair on a bench along the fjord where we could feel the cooler air off the water as it mixed with the warm air heated by the sun-warmed land. She’s been cutting my hair for years now and I like that because it’s convenient and free. The photo below shows how Google maps recorded Patti’s arm movements as she cut my hair (within the red circle). Apparently, Google Maps detected she was walking back and forth across the water.

Then we went by a grocery (also shown in the photo above) and back home where we continued to work on our itinerary.

August 9, 2023 – Woden’s Day (Wednesday): The Rental Car

This morning I fleshed out some more of the details of our travel planning and we attempted to make a rental car reservation. The first company, Discover Cars, declined to rent us a car, the reason they gave was because we are US citizens and not Norwegian. However, the Europcar website said it would rent to us if a car was available. After putting in all the required information, I received a response saying they’d get back to me within 8 hours to let me know if a car is available. Within an hour they sent me an email saying they didn’t have any cars available.

After lunch we decided to take the bus out to the airport where all the rental car companies are, so we walked into town to take the bus. There was a fun little SNAFU at the bus stop because there’s a temporary route for the bus we wanted to take because of road construction, and the bus stop we were at was not being used. But of course, not knowing the language here, we weren’t aware of the situation. An older Norwegian woman who spoke no English was trying to tell us about it, then she beckoned us to follow her to another bus stop where she found a younger Norwegian woman who spoke English and could explain it to us. The younger woman actually wanted to catch the same bus as us and so we walked a few more blocks with her to catch the bus at a different stop. Patti sat with her on the bus and got a few tips about things to do around Tromsø, then the woman got off at the shopping mall bus stop.

At the airport we found the rental car places and went into the Europcar office that denied our request to rent a car. There were two fun Norwegian guys in there, one of them looked like the guys I’ve seen on the Netflix series “Vikings” — he had a similar haircut with the back half of his head shaved close. They remembered my booking request from earlier today and explained that they didn’t have any cars available until the day after we wanted to start the rental. We told them that our dates were flexible, and they ended up finding a car for us for August 17 – 28 and we confirmed that reservation. It costs $1,540 for 11 days, $140/day. Previously, we considered renting a car and driving it one way to Trondheim, which would have been $250/day because there’s a stiff one-way penalty fee. We also looked at renting an RV or a camper-van, which would have been $550/day.

We got back on the bus at the airport to return in the direction of town, and the same younger Norwegian woman we’d met earlier got on the bus at the shopping mall bus stop. We decided to get off at the same stop as her, so we enjoyed the coincidence of seeing and talking to her again.

FYI, I’ve been buying bus tickets using the app on my phone and they are good for 1.5 hours, so I didn’t need to buy more tickets for the return ride since the original tickets were still valid for another 45 minutes.

We decided to get off the bus before we got the downtown area because we wanted to walk around a lake we saw on the earlier ride. It’s called Prestvannet and there is a walking trail around it. Here’s Patti at one of the viewpoints.

After that we walked back home through neighborhoods we’ve not seen before. As usual, people had very pretty flowers and I liked this view of a flower garden with the mountain in the background.

After we arrived home, we made reservations to fly from Tromsø to Trondheim on August 28, which is the day we return the rental car to the airport. Then we made an Airbnb reservation in Trondheim for August 28 – September 4.

Tomorrow we need to make four Airbnb reservations for our rental car adventure in the Lofoten Islands.

This evening I went out on the balcony and saw this weird looking cloud that I think is a lenticular cloud. Neither of us had seen a cloud like this before. It looked like a UFO.

August 10, 2023 – Thor’s Day (Thursday): Finalizing Our 11-Day Plan

Google Maps Timeline sent me my July location update. Here’s the map, we were in Florida, Oslo, and Svalbard. I like it because it helps visualize how far north Svalbard is. I still think it’s really cool that we spent a week in Svalbard, I like to call it an “exotic” destination.

This morning we went for jogs then to the grocery store where I got an excellent pasta dish off the hot bar for lunch. Then we spent most of the rest of the day firming up plans for our rental car adventure and making four Airbnb reservations in the Lofotens.

This map shows what we’ve worked out for our rental car adventure. We’ll be doing sort of a loop where we stay at four different places for 2 or 3 days at a time and sight-see in the Lofoten Islands.

August 11, 2023 – Frigg’s Day (Friday): A Nice Walk

We’ve been spending too much time indoors this week planning future travel so today we went out for a walk. We did a loop around the southern end of the island.

This pretty little marina is just south of our Airbnb. The water is very clear and a lovely blue-green.

Then we got to a rocky area of the coast with tide pools, I love tidepools, here I am with my reflection in a tidepool.

I can usually find all kinds of lifeforms in tidepools. These barnacles were sweeping their legs through the water to filter out some food.

This pretty little sea anemone was next to some seaweed.

And there were Limpets!

And there were lots of these little snails crawling around.

We soon got to the bathing beach where people were sunbathing, wading, and paddleboarding.

The weather was sunny and warm, although the water felt a bit chilly to me. Farther on we went by a Folk Musuem where they had several old buildings from old times. Here’s two of them, notice the sod roofs.

The rest of our walk was up through neighborhoods and along a lighted skiing path. That was interesting, I think that in the winter, when it’s dark most of the time, you can ski around the island on these lighted paths. That’s probably a pretty good workout since there are plenty of hills. We found this map on a sign, the red lines are the lighted skiing paths.

On the way back down into downtown we passed this building with a nice mosaic on the side.

It is a school building and maybe the mosaic tells a folk story, but I don’t know what it is.

It was a nice walk today in the sun and fresh fjord air of Tromsø.

I’m also relieved that we have the next couple of weeks of travel all planned out.