Having decided that a trip out to the Solovetski Islands would be nice my lot then found themselves with a few days to fill in hanging around Arkangelsk as being the height of summer they couldn’t get a flight out to the islands until Sunday and would come back on Monday. Back in ’98 they had tried to catch the ferry to the islands from Kim but then it was running very sporadicly and some people had been wanting a week for it so they decided not to b...

Episode 10Sorry, it’s been a while since I whipped L into doing a bit more, but I’ve been having an identity crisis that still isn’t fully resolved. All these years I’ve been quite happy to believe that I was a ‘bean bear’, but lately L keeps calling me a ‘grub’, so that now I am totally confused and don’t know what I am, then L clarified the situation today by calling me a ‘grubby bean bear’. Now ...

Episode 9to start with my secretary is going to do a bit of a fill in on something she forgot to mention but did load some photos of it last time.There was something called the “arctic henge”. It a stone construction near Raufarhofn very near to the northern most point. This is still under construction and by the look of the equipment standing idle around it nothing has been done for quite some time. There really isn’t any way to compare this mo...

Episode 8North of Kopasker is the northernmost part of Iceland and as it was just coming up to mid-summer my lot thought that they had timed it well to see the midnight sun. Not that they are usually awake at that time, nor is it actually the middle of the night here. They don’t have daylight saving, not much point when you have 24 hr daylight but they are still slightly ahead of real time. Sunset such as it is, isn’t until after midnight). the lady a...

Here L will take a couple of paragraphs and explain the tree situation or lack there of.Apparently there used to be reasonable forests here at the time of settlement. However, the people of the time needed the timber for construction and for firewood so the forests got totally destroyed. In the 20th century a few small re-aforestation project got under way. So there is some trees here, mostly they are a conifer, probably spruce, along with some birch and arctic ...