Now that we're in relatively high latitudes, it doesn’t get very dark and even then, it’s quite late when it does. The first photo was taken last night at twenty to ten and it is still perfectly light.



The grey skies in the photo were still with us in the morning and we hadn’t planned on doing a whole lot other than go for a walk in the immediate countryside around the town, so we had a leisurely start and were up and about by 10:00 . After a bout of shopping, I decided to do battle with Comviq. Comviq supply the dongle that enables us to access the internet and for which we paid 200 and something SEK for a month’s access with 5GB data allowance. Now there is a means whereby you can find out where you are with regard to usage, you basically set up an account with them and then you access it. In theory. The trouble is, it is all in Swedish and to the best of my ability, I thought I was doing the right thing but it kept on asking me for an SMS password, which I hadn’t received. The program on the dongle said I had 4 messages in fact, but when I asked to see them it was always blank. So, I got involved with the on-line help, and after 45 minutes, was told that she couldn’t help me and I had to phone their technical help desk. Bear in mind, all I wanted to know was my usage, this is not a state secret!!

I tried calling the help desk and got the usual choices, press 1 for this, 2 for that etc and it might as well have said that, as of course it was all in Swedish and I didn’t have a clue what option to select . After 10 minutes of pressing buttons and always hearing a computer, I gave up and went, together with computer, to the friendly Tourist Office, where Annette (we’re now on first name terms!) could help. It transpires that what it was saying was that there was a queue, and I waited for over 10 minutes to talk to a very friendly, but ultimately useless girl – she was not allowed to give me any information and couldn’t find a way of getting me an SMS code that I could use to access my account. This took another 50 minutes and by now I was more than usually frustrated!! Finally, a throw – away comment she made on the lines of 'this isn’t normally a problem if you were using a phone’ got us thinking that I could take the SIM card out of the dongle and stick it in an unblocked phone. This I did and got 9 messages, 3 separate SMS codes (the last one worked) and hallelujah, after well over two hours effort, I found out that we had tons of capacity left, which is all I wanted to know in the first place!!

By now it was lunch time, so we decided to postpone the walk till the afternoon – not a bad idea as the weather was improving, longish intervals of warm sun now occurring in between periods of large cumulus clouds .

Our walk took us along the opposite side of the head of the fjord to where the boat was, through some woods and finally out to a municipal swimming area and a camp site. Whilst in the woods we came across a very large slow worm, I was really excited, I’ve not seen one for years. However, I missed a photo opportunity as it slithered into the dense vegetation on the side of the path and I didn’t want to stress or disturb it. Returning to the town, we then found a path that climbed the hill on ‘our’ side of the water and saw the town and the fjord from a different perspective. Then we hurried back to the boat as the clouds were looking increasingly threatening, which proved accurate as it rained again.

That night we had roast filet of pork, it was delicious and due to the wealth of spare capacity from my internet allowance, we were able to watch a bit of BBC c/o the iPlayer. And then to bed.