Sun, 03 Aug 2003

author Tim	location Tromsø Camping, Tromsdalen, Troms, Norge
posted 20:03 CEST	section Europe2002/Europe/Norge ( all photos )

North to Tromsø ( 4 photos )
After the last couple of days spending our time looking around Lofoten not really making much headway, we decided to drive quite a bit today.
This lead us winding first east to the main road E6, then further north towards Tromsø, the largest town for quite a long way.
The journey was not really notable, other than a service station that wouldn't sell us fuel (easy, just drive to the next one!), a couple of stops along the way for food (including a French war memorial complete with flags where we ate breakfasty food at lunch time), and a few more places which had no idea where to get the gas we need from.
Eventually we wound into Tromsø, a pretty place which is known as the world's most northerly University town, and also the town in Norge with the highest number of pubs per capita. Coincidence?
We found the town's campsite, which is nice but quite expensive. After locating a spot, we drove back across the rather impressive bridge into Tromsø proper. There are three parts to the city - the mainland (where we are staying), a small-ish island where most of the city is, and a much larger island where many of the suburbs are.
From the city, it was quite easy to see the Tromsøbrua (bridge) and Arctic Cathedral, which combined form Tromsø's answer to Sydney Harbour - the Cathedral has more than a passing resemblance to one of the sails of the Opera house.
Not to suprisingly, much of the town was closed down being a Sunday afternoon, so we had a bit of a wander around the town before deciding to head back to the caravan park and cook dinner.
It was tempting to buy something from town, but since we are still without gas, we thought it good to cook while we had access to a kitchen. We almost changed our minds since the kitchen had a TV playing crappy American sitcoms like Full House (complete with subtitles, of course) - the sort of thing we have not seen for months now and don't miss one little bit.
That sorted, we made the most of the free showers (probably why the site costs so much), before doing some travel planning and not much else besides.

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