7th - I woke up and spent 6 hours writing the blog for the last two weeks, as we just never had the time being at Glastonbury and then were too busy helping out with my parents house to do it when we got back! I then spent another 3 hours putting the blog on to the internet site, as my parents have bad internet connection, courtesy of BT!After that I finally managed to get out of the house and drove to my friend Jenny's house for a chilled out evening of TV and pizza - yum!Ralph spent all day completing another chapter of his book, it's only a couple of chapters off being finished now!

8th - Woke today and decided to do something about my back.I have had a bruising pain on part of my spine for the last couple of months and I have realised that I slouch a lot and struggle to sit up straight.Ralph and my dad have been making fun of me, saying that there is nothing seriously wrong and if I went to a chiropractor I was just be told to sit up straighter!I thought they might be right but decided that if I leave it my slouching might only get worse and I will end up like one of those old ladies that is so hunched over she can only look at the ground!I managed to get an appointment for the same day and set off, only for the car to break down outside of our local shop!I had forgotten my mobile so I had to walk back home and tell Ralph the car was outside the shop and completely dead.Not a good sign when this is the car we are taking around Europe, starting on Thursday!Still, at least it has broken down here, while we still have my dad to help us out and we speak English, rather than in some odd foreign country, like it did in France!Ralph dropped me off in town for my appointment with the chiropractor while he went to phone my dad to see what could be done about the car.My chiropractor is called Robert Fowler (yes, I am having my back manipulated by the footballer Robbie Fowler he he!) and he is a really lovely guy, although he is younger than me, which is always concerning, as it makes you realise you are getting old!He went through a questionnaire and took a look at my back before doing some leg strength tests and giving me his verdict - my spine is completely shot to pieces!One of the worst he has ever seen! (I did want to know how many he had actually seen as he only seems about 28, but I thought it would be rude to ask!)He said that the bottom of my spine is completely straight and has no curve at all, which it obviously should have.He said that due to this I am curving the middle of my spine to try and compensate, which is where the pain is coming from, and the top of my spine is having to curve even more the other way to compensate for that, basically it's a total mess!!He said that he could get rid of the pain with 3 weeks of sessions going 3 times a week, but to get the spine closer to the position it should be in (he would never be able to get it how it should be!) would take 3 months of sessions!Obviously, as we head for Norway on Thursday this is just not possible, but I think I will definitely have to go when I get back, as he said that leaving it much longer would lead to serious long term problems (!).Anyway, he started the treatment and my back was popping and cracking like sausages over a fire, and then said that I would probably get a headache and some other pain due to the treatment - and I did!I got a shooting pain down my shoulder blade for the rest of the day and a headache - it has to get worse before it gets better!Ralph came to collect me and told me that my dad had sent someone out from work to replace the battery in the car, as they believed this was the problem and, luckily enough it was and the car was back up and running in no time (thanks again dad!).I then went to see my cousin Lisa to drop some things off with the items they are storing for us, and when I got back Ralph had gone out in my mum's car to get some stuff for my dad for fishing and had scraped it against a metal post!He was totally gutted and we are still waiting for the bill!So really, not a great day!Car broke down, my back is wrecked, mum's car has a big dent in it - still, things do come in threes!

9th - Got up and went for an aromatherapy massage at a lovely new beauty salon in my parents village called Rain.It was really nice and she used oils to help with my cold, build my immune system and wake me up a bit!I left there and Ralph went out to the supermarket to get ingredients because, I am cooking tea tonight for everyone!To anyone who knows me this is a big thing because I don't cook! The majority of the afternoon was spent peeling tomatoes, and browning chicken for the Chicken Cacciatore which turned out to be a bit of a success, the most pleasing moment being that my 11 year old fussy eater sister Kaycia asked for seconds.Later I went to see AC and UJ (Auntie Carole and Uncle John that we stayed with over Christmas in the Florida Keys) to get some information about Norway, as it turns out I had some distant relatives there (my Nannan's dad's sister, Aunt Jane!) who had quite a colourful life and who my mum and AC visited when they were children.After some internet investigation and a fantastic memory recall from AC (she remembered the exact address of the place that Aunt Jane used to own and where she used to visit when she went there!) we managed to find it on the map so we could seek it out when we got to Bergen.

10th - We got up early (for us) to drive to Newcastle. Before catching the ferry, Kirsty went to see her heavily pregnant friend Lisa (not long now Lisa!) and I went to see my friends Linda and Darran for lunch. It was strange to go to the Port of Tyne in a non-work capacity, but they got us onto the Queen of Scandinavia really quickly, so we sailed down the Tyne and watched England disappear on calm seas. The economy cabins are actually bigger and more comfortable than the Premier Classe budget hotels we stayed in in France, and the gentle rocking of the boat induced a three hour afternoon/evening nap before we found the energy to explore the restaurants, shop, cinema, bar, pool, sauna and disco onboard. Of course the best entertainment is just watching the coasts and the sea - the oilrigs at night are quite spectacular too.

11th - It's like being rocked to sleep like a baby on the ferry (the North Sea, thankfully, remained calm) and by the time we woke in the morning we were in Stavanger, Norway and the Fjords. The scenery here is beautiful, if a little like Scotland, even in the grey weather, with hundreds of small craggy islands and log houses. The wildlife officer onboard says they regularly see minke whales, bottlenose dolphins and eagles on the Fjords, but we just saw the mountainous coastline and the odd fishing boat. We arrived in Bergen a little early but another ferry was using the launch (I thought you only got queues at airports) so we didn't get off the ferry until 6.30 instead of 6pm. I have to say that I thought a North Sea crossing would be tedium in a vomitarium, but it was so relaxing and a great way to travel (and sleep!). Now we have the task of finding some accommodation and, given the expense of the budget hotels (£110-300!), we expect to be searching well into the night for an affordable log cabin before we finally settle for our tent - cue the rains! One stroke of luck is that a thousand year old law says that people can just pitch a tent anywhere outside a city for free. We might age ten years in the next month, but we'll have saved money! Driving to the nearest campsite, the heavens opened and threw down the most rain in a fifteen minute period I've ever seen. People were pulling off the road because of poor visibility (and possibly fear), not us Brits - stiff upper lip and all that. We found a campsite, pitched our tent in the rain and went off to explore Bergen, which is a beautiful little town about 1 mile from end to end with brightly coloured 18th Century wooden houses surrounding a 14th Century harbour, a modern shopping area, a couple of small parks and a student area. Our first stop was a house on Rosenbergsgaten at the foot of some steep church steps to see the apartment block that was owned by distant aunt of Kirsty's (Aunt Jane as previously mentioned) and was visited by her mum and aunt some years ago (notice we didn't say how many years to save their blushes!Those photos might stir a few memories Janice & AC). This was close to a Chinese restaurant featured in the Lonelyplanet guide which provides cheap(ish) food, so we went there for dinner. Norway is SO expensive that a pint of milk is £1.70, a small bottle of coke is £2.40, a pint of beer is £4.80 - 6.80 and a standard no frills main course costs from £20-35.Seriously a burger from a burger van is £10.00 and a burger in a standard café is anything from £17.00! We are back to eating only an evening meal a day. We walked back to the car through a nice park with waterfalls and a statue of a bloke that looks like Lenin (called Gustav or Henrik or something), past a statue of Edvard Grieg, the Norwegian composer, and through the pedestrianised shopping area with an interesting monument to the Norwegians who worked and died on the seas over the centuries. Having got our bearings in Bergen we went back to the campsite to work on a bad back and a stiff neck.

12th - We woke up with a bad back and a sore neck and were surprised to find that even at this latitude (longitude?) there is no night-time proper. At two in the morning there is still just enough light to read by! When we get inside the Arctic Circle (come on Little Blue Micra - you can do it!) we expect to be full-time insomniacs. There's a bus stop about a mile from the campsite which we used to get into Bergen centre rather than fork out for parking and roadtolls and it dropped us off at the old harbour, ideal for the museums. Museum 1: The Hanseatic Museum. A small wooden house used by the German merchants of the Hanseatic Leaugue from the 13th to the 18th Cenruries has been restored and shows how life was for the merchants who were not allowed to mix with the people of Bergen (for many reasons including the influence that their German language might have on the Norwegian language) while they traded Norwegian stockfish and cod-liver oil - more interesting than it sounds! Museum 2: Shotstuene. A large lodge used by the Hanseatic merchants for dining, teaching and celebrations. Museum 3: The Leprosy Museum. A look around a leper hospital. Norway had tons of these hospitals and did pioneering work in studies into leprosy.Cue lots of pictures of the disfigured patients, some who were kept in the hospital for over 30 years until they died! Museum 4: Hakonshallen. It was built in 1261, on the mouth of the harbour as part of the defensive fortifications, for King Hakon's son's wedding. It has a huge stained-glass window lit banqueting room and vaulted cellars with chunks of bedrock jutting through the floors. Museum 5: Rosencrantz Tower. Built in the 1560s, it is part of the harbour defences and has dungeon cells, Kings' chambers and medieval toilets - obviously we had to take the necessary photos! Museum 6: Theta Museum. In a small room above a shop set back from the harbour a group of Norwegian navymen resisted the Nazis in WWII and sent vital intelligence to Britain. It is restored, as the resistance fighters remembered it, with radios, crude gun making equipment and declassified intelligence logs. Then we took the funicular to the top of a nearby mountain to see the incredible views of Bergen and walk back through the woods to the city for dinner at a cheap(ish) Norwegian restaurant. Fish soup for Kirsty, meatballs for me - yum! A bit of a mix up with the bus system had us waiting in the lovely evening sunshine on the wrong side of the harbour for the right bus and refusing the invitations of drunken stag-party-bus crew for a free ride - still can't decide if we did the right thing there! Then back to the tent for some research on where to go next and a poor night's sleep resulting in further spine damage due to punctured inflatable pillows - great! One last point about today: returning to the campsite at the end of the day we decided to take a (notorious Ralphy) shortcut from the bus stop, which involved walking a couple of hundred feet through a field. As usual the homing pigeon instincts failed me and we found ourselves walking miles into the unknown through moss and thicket, into valleys and up hills, trying not to wake the trolls or disturb the bears.

13th - On Day Two of driving in America and France we broke down, feared the worst and then had no more motor troubles for the rest of the trip so, if we break-down today, the omens are good. A pleasant but slow drive to Stavanger - the maximum speed here is 55mph and the unavoidable ferries and tolls (though not yet trolls) hamper you further. To avoid an extra 300 mile journey we had to take two £20+ ferries across the Fjords. This should have been a lovely, tranquil, peaceful time, but it just left us penny-pinching travellers just muttering 'hurrumph' and wanting the whole journey to be over with. Stavanger has a few nice Bergen-like wooden buildings around a large pond with a fountain - but the rest of the city is dull, industrial and ahem-ing expensive! After a few laps of the city to find cheap accommodation, we drove to the first place we checked out and settled for a slum of a hostel with shared shower-room, no bedding on its two dirty single beds and filthy furniture for the sum of £65. Compare this with an American motel that had a king-size bed, coffee maker, microwave, fridge and free wifi for £20-35! This prompted quite a debate during our overpriced meal tonight; the upshot being that Kirsty managed to put her finger on why I had a face like a slapped arse all day. Namely that it's ahem-ing expensive to do everything other than breathe here and there's no ahem-ing Disney World or Cape Canaveral. Therefore we've slimmed our Scandinavian excursion to the bare minimum - and that doesn't even take into account Iceland, Greenland, Denmark or Finland! We want the US back, where it feels like you're enjoying yourself, rather than just haemorrhaging cash and having to take expensive ferries to get anywhere. The car did not break down today, so the omens are not good. We might cheer up tomorrow. Maybe not. We'll just have to see.