On the Scandinavian leg of this particular InterRail trip we'd swung through Copenhagen in Denmark and continued over to Sweden. Our thought was to overnight in Gothenburg.
But something didn't feel right. There were too many youths of our age on the train. So when we struck up a conversation with some girls in the cabin and learned that Bruce Springsteen was playing Gothenburg that night. We instantly realized we wouldn't find a bed in the city that night.
So we pulled out the maps and our European timetable, a tome of all the trains in Europe and considered our options. We decided we might as well see how far north we could get in 48 hours. So at Gothenburg we extended our tickets on to Oslo where we took a break and stayed in a hostel.
At a local grocery store we found some cans of reindeer meatballs which we just had to try – we had to buy some food item in order to buy some alcoholic beverages, this being norway, after all.
Having wandered around town and capturing yesterday's picture, we boarded a train once more and rode it to the end of the line, Bodo.
Inside the Arctic Circle (I grabbed a frame from the train window as we passed by the marker) in the middle of summer I got to experience my first (and only so far) night of midnight sun.
I have to say, I found it weird and unsettling.
Out in the harbor a guy was water skiing. I've kept a frame of that also, but more as a keepsake than for it's quality.
It was about two in the morning when we tried to go to sleep, failing miserably because it just wasn't dark!
Now the flip side of midnight sun is daylight-less days in the winter. Experiencing that is on my (unwritten) bucket list, but not near the top!
Many years later, one of my friends from that trip was visiting Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, England and quite by chance bumped into the two girls we'd talked with on the train the Gothenburg. It's a small world.
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