On the way (continued)

Trømso Airport, Norway. 7 July 2023

Turns out, it takes a long time to get to the northernmost point in Norway even by air travel.

How long? Long enough to read too much about expeditions to the North and South Poles in which the corpses of expedition members were found years later frozen after having abandoned a beset ship (stuck in the ice) and trying to walk to some form of rescue that never materialized.

And long enough to admire views of snow-covered mountains from the airport terminal and wonder if camping in the Arctic Circle is a good idea…even if it is a balmy 45F. I probably won’t pull my frost-bitten toes off with my socks as some of those expedition members did, but a jet-lagged, foggy brain begins to imagine things.

Maybe a warm-up ride to a hotel that’s about five miles from the airport is the best plan. I’d use the excuse that I’m getting into Honnisvåg late, but the sun doesn’t set.

Which reminds me…

It was either a year ago or just this morning that I was in line with an Israeli photographer headed to somewhere east of Iceland that I didn’t even know existed to take photos of polar bears and white foxes and the like. At one point Moshe told me that the constant daylight is a problem for an observant Jew. Shabbat starts at sundown. If the sun doesn’t go down, what to do? Solution: just sync to sundown at the center of the world – Jerusalem.

By the way, Moshe does some photography work for National Geographic. I’ll be watching for his polar bears on his Instagram account at Moshe Perger.