Ben Edwards, crew whole expedition
Hello. We’re still in Tromsø and plan to leave tomorrow morning. The Mother, Big Nose and I stayed in the hotel last night. As it turned out Bea and Joe were here and when we all went to dinner they joined us.
They had spent the last two days in a husky farm helping to train the young puppies. This farm never sells the husky’s and so has over three hundred of them. The way the farm makes money is by racing. The owner is a world class husky sled racer and runs the farm on the money she gets from the races.
Dinner was nice but I was tired so I left early and went to bed. I had been assured that I would be woken up at eight o’clock to have breakfast in the hotel, but The Mother and Big Nose decided that because I was tired they would leave me to sleep in. Because of this I eventually woke up at half twelve local time. I went down to the boat and then immediately went out again with The Mother and Big Nose for lunch. We went to a café in town which is apparently quite well known because of the coffee it does. I tried it and it was really very good. The food was nice too.
After that we went back to the hotel and Big Nose showed The Mother and me how to transfer photos and video from the cameras to the laptop and then send them to Frances. After that Big Nose went back to the boat and The Mother and I went to the retail park that’s near the airport because there were a few things we needed that we still didn’t have. While we were there I got the next fluffy animal to put on the front of the boat. In the end we chose a small polar bear wearing a scarf.
The taxi ride to the retail park went through one of the reasons I love Norway. A tunnel. the Norwegians do tunnels properly. This particular tunnel was in fact an underground motorway complex that runs all the way under Tromsø including several A-roads and places you can turn off if you break down. When we got back The Mother, Big Nose, Beble, Joséff, Nikolai and I went and had dinner in the hotel.
After dinner we went back to the boat and started putting the stuff we’d bought away. Part way through a young man named Emil turned up and asked whether he could ask some questions for the newspaper he worked for. It’s called the Northern Lights (in Norwegian). So we talked to him for a bit. We gave him one of the business cards Hazel had printed in Lerwick and told him about the bottle with the message I threw over the side. After He left, Big Nose went back up to the hotel to do some work with the footage of an interview we did before Emil arrived and The Mother and I put away some more stuff. I then went up to the hotel, grabbed Big Nose’s laptop and wrote:
You get the idea. The Mother joins at this bit and Big Nose goes home so the navigation stuff is up to us now. Anyway, we leave tomorrow and I’ll write again then, bye.