If it's Thursday it must be Riga Monday 26 November Muonio, Finland We stayed overnight in a room above a petrol station in rural Lapland in Finland. Well, it is not as bad as it sounds. Yes, it was one of ten rooms above a petrol station, but they were clean, modern, spacious rooms and we had our own sauna in the bathroom. It is Finland after all. We departed Tromsø in the snow and had intermittent snow and snowy roads until we crossed over the mount...

The smell of snow and torsk We headed north from Trondheim toward the Lofoten Islands. Can't make it in one go so we are stopping in Mo I Rana, which sounds like it should be in Tonga rather than northern Norway. The DK guide book notes that no one seems to know the origin of the name. My theory is that 7 centuries or so ago, Lothar, helmsman of a Viking longship came into land here a bit too fast. Lothar said to the captain, Motar, "Mo, I ran aground!" Over t...

Eric wouldn't take me to see the Museum which was the power plant making heavy water during WWII, the subject of a sabotage attack that is the basis for the film "the Heroes of Telemark" one of my old time favourites but he did take me to Lillehammer (originally with the thought of doing some snowshoeing, but unlike last year there wasn't any snow yet) where I desperately wanted to go in 1994 to the Winter Olympics. No wonder the Norwegians can ski so well; the ...

The Next Adventure After our week in Paris and week in Vannes we are moving on to the next big adventure which is driving the length of Norway. We left Vannes with a sense of leaving home having loved our flat and really enjoyed the city and surrounds. Had a mad driving day through Brittany to Belgium courtesy of a route approved by the Travel Master and Navigator but set by the Peugeot (known as Phoebe as her number plate starts FB) GPS and to the Ibis ho...

Le centenaire de l'armistice My grandfather, Joe McConnell, (Joe Gup to me and my siblings) served in the US Army in France in WW1. On 11 November 1918 he was at Camp Meucon, eight miles north of Vannes in Brittany. The 139th Field Artillery Regiment, American Expeditionary Force (AEF), was training with the French artillery at Camp Meucon to learn how to use the French 155mm howitzers before moving to the front. Thus, the main reason for us being in Vannes wa...