WHEN YOU SING WITH ALL THE VOICES OF THE MOUNTAIN, WHEN YOU PAINT WITH ALL THE COLOURS OF THE WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIND!!!!

I am above the Arctic Circle right now. (Say what?) I am far, far, far, far, far away from you right now. I am closer to the North Pole than to you, dang, but not so dang! I'm that far away. I am miles away and I found my place, the isolation, the quiet peace I was looking for. I'm pretty impressed I made it this far! JSorry, but I'm still getting over the fact that I was able to drag my ass (under my own power) to the top of Norway! Go self confidence! Woo!

Kelsey and I made our journey, thanks to the wonders of globalization, by a mere 1 hour flight, where those only a few centuries before us would have collected their provisions to last months, for me, it was an in-flight snack. It's a small world. Time is meaningless now. Space, however, is ever so meaningful.

I cannot describe where I am right now because what I see out my window is too beautiful to be captured in a sentence. Kelsey and I took a quick flight from Oslo to Bodø (Boe-duh) in Nordland and then hopped a ferry to Moskenes on the Lofoten Islands. This is my heaven. It is too magical for man, too beautiful for me. We had to shuffle our ferry schedule because they reduced the summer ferry times, so that allowed us time to explore Bodø a little longer, our temporary gateway home to the splendours that lay only 3 hours away. We dragged our packs around for a while til we found a coffee shop and sat down, running in and out for tea and sandwiches, but mostly for warmth. We wandered around for a while looking for entertainment and eventually circled our way to the point where we had a serious jam session on the permafrost ground, hollowed out, leaving us with a bunch of different drum tones, ripe for self expression and relief. The ferry wound its way into the harbour and we got on and readied ourselves for the adventure.

The mainland sank below the horizon and the endless sun revealed the Lofoten Wall, the string of islands that would be our home for the next week. We wrapped up tight (it's cold up here, go figure), wiping the salt spray from our faces, and watched the sun not set. It was just like the Alaska I knew from my childhood, the sun never sets, but what is left in the void of darkness is the magic hour: the oranges, pinks, and purples that make anything beautiful. We did not have eternal sunshine, we had eternal sunset.The boat approached the harbour and the smells of fish and clarity filled our city lungs. It had been so long since we had seen the stark beauty of nature; it was a long awaited reunion. The air is pure here, a purity you do not have to second guess. We took a bus to Reine, a small fishing village 10 minutes away and settled in to our very own private rorbuer, the traditional fishing cabins that the fishermen here in Norway use. We have our own bathroom, beds, kitchen, and view. We look on to a dock, but beyond that is the work of a greater power. Lofoten is a series of islands made from the glaciers that span Northern Europe, and after retreating, left Lofoten with a stark, Arctic beauty that I've never scene before. If you look simply at the structures of the communities, you could be in coastal Atlantic Canada, but as your gaze wanders to the towering monoliths looming above you, secretly shrouded in a misty cover, inviting you to come up for a look, you feel small, but privileged. Kelsey and I have not stopped smiling since we got here.

The coast is littered, rather gifted, with a series of small villages that rent out these cabins to tourists who then take off to the mountains, but it is an island easy to get lost on. Kelsey and I have felt as if it is just us and nature up here above the Arctic Circle.

12am feels like 5pm in Canada. There really is no dark up here, at least not that we've found. After getting a good night's sleep to the sound of our seagull neighbours, we woke up to tackle the mountains. The whole point of our little sejour here on Lofoten was to come without any plans or expectations, but just to try our hand at winging it. And it seems to be working! We walked back to the ferry dock to get some perspective on what there is to do here on the island, going with the rumour of a great hike up the mountain overlooking Reine. This hike was intense. The Norwegians have a little bit of a different scale for grading their hikes than we do back in Canada. A moderate hike would include a near vertical climb, assisted with chains and ladders, traversing the craggy spine of leviathan, to a view that would trump anything I have ever seen. The hike started at the road and wound, climbed, and shot its way up the mountain, leaving us gaping with a sense of achievement, more for me cos I hate climbs where the sheer beauty is overshadowed by the dread of falling backwards, toppling to a certain doom of rocks. Kelsey loved it, I wrote my will with every step. Positivity ruled the day, but ya... found out I was a bit afraid of heights that day! The view at the top made it all worth it. We could see from sea to sea, looking over Reine, and its red cabins, up the Reinefjord, and down the coast to the mainland. It rains in Scandinavia, as I think I've told you. The forecast is not "it is a 20% chance of rain", but rather "it will rain for 20% of the day". We were drenched by the time we clutched the spine of the spine of the mountain, but as soon as we stepped foot on to the naked rock, it stopped, lifting the clouds high above us, leaving an unscathed view of the world below us. I cannot describe it. Fjords, reefs, mountains, islands, lakes, snow, heaven, earth; I saw everything that day. I will have to show you pictures when I see you and let you make your own description of heaven, but I saw it. Wet, broken, and tired, we breathed in our soul food and slid down the mountain for a home cooked meal, icing on the cake.

We decided to skip the shrimp paste and whale meat, both delicacies here in Norway, and went straight for the organic wheat pasta and basil and tomato sauce, a safe choice on our part. We watched the endless sun with our new friends, the Gulls, who had no qualms about staring us down as we finished our meal. They watched over our drying clothes on the veranda as we slept the night away.

The b*****s took my f***ing jeans! I woke up dazed from the lack of darkness and went out to fetch my jeans from the railing, but the sea had other plans. Kelsey thought I had already taken them inside, but the gust and the tide had stolen them from my clutches! DAMN! This trip really has taught me the rigors of no attachment. I lost my favourite jacket, f***, fine. I lost my wallet, f***, meh. Lost my jeans to the sea, meh. It's been a learning experience, what the sea wants, the sea will have.

So I left nature to enjoy her new spoils, and went on a new hike. Kelsey and I deciphered the bus schedule and made our way to Å ("Oh"), the first city in the world! Well, first alphabetically! We haven't quite found a consistent pronunciation for Norwegian quite yet...å can be "oh", "oo", "awh", or just simply "ummmmmm what?". Æ is a variable one, some like to try "aaaeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrooooooooo", but there are still a million other fun ways to butcher it! Ø is a tricky one. It can be "errr" "oooouuuuuuurrrr" or "aaerrrr". Bodø, the town we landed in, was pronounced by us as Bodo. When we got to check in, we told the startled lady behind the desk where we would like to go, "Bodo, please!"She looked befuddled and had to consult her route map to see if Norwegian Airlines flew to such a destination. We spelt it out and she gasped "OH" with the undertone of "OH you stupid foreigner!" It's pronounced Bowduuu, or Buddha, or something like that. Reine, the town we're staying in, has been pronounced Renuh, Rain, Rrrrrrrrrrrrain, or R-buh for those of us who have given up on deciphering the Scandinavian alphabet.

Where was I, yes, nature took my pants. We headed out on the bus to Å to try our hand at hiking...again! The weather didn't so much rain as it did mist. The islands became our produce aisle, as the greenery became preserved with a delicate mist to heighten the flavour of the colours. We were dumped off in a parking lot, a sight to be seen this far north, and wound our way up the mountain, stopping to take in the ocean, something we didn't get close to yesterday on our mountain hike. We stopped, reflected, and talked. It has been an amazing trip for that. I should probably explain, for those of you who don't know, who exactly my travel partner is. I'm travelling with my cousin Kelsey, the daughter of my dad's Sister Maureen. Kelsey and I are the same age, and we got along famously when we were younger, the only thing was that she lived all the way on the other side of the world...Toronto. When you're young and living in Calgary, Toronto might as well be Hong Kong, or Egypt; mystical places that swallow up your family, never to be seen again. Kelsey and I tried catching up, but we were always out and about in the world when the other one had time off, or was in the other's part of the country. I was in Africa, she was in Italy, and so went our adolescence. Then I went to Queens. She's going to Georgetown and loving it, but is not too far from Toronto, neither is Kingston! So we got back in synch and have been seeing each other often enough through out the year, Easter, Thanksgiving, all the while speculating about our lives abroad. Talking about this passion led to the realization that we could have this, that and the other thing NOW. We planned and chatted and eventually made this sejour in Scandinavia a reality! We're both sorting out our thoughts in a similar field, International Relations for her and Global Development for me, working out life, love and loss above the Arctic Circle, with the magic word "family" tying us together. She's a good one and we're having an awesome time putting the peace and pieces back in each others lives. So there you go, now you're all caught up!

Anyways, today, here and now. We made our way around the sea to a lake, shrouded in mist, but gifted with a rainbow. The mist from the mountains mingled with the sun from the sea to create a rainbow that lasted all day. We stopped often to enjoy the work of something greater than ourselves. Nature is a powerful one. The whole trail is marked with cairns from travellers past, leading us high and low around the lake. We figured we would leave our own mark and made THE BEST inuksuk I've ever seen. This guy had legs, posture, a certain dignity, and a good head. He was perfectly flawed and flawed perfectly. He'll be standing for centuries to come. We both forgot a time telling device, a non-essential item on the Lofoten Islands, except when you need to catch a bus. Forgetting a watch seemed to be a relief in the end. We kept saying "one more ridge and we'll stop. Ok, one more, one more, we'll sit, have lunch and head back". This went on for a while. We finally reached a point where we could see around to the end of the lake and sat for a lunch of cheese and crackers, looking at the wind sneaking up on the coast line, changing the texture of the water as it went. We took the road less travelled and made a b-line for the shore below, tripping our way down over roots and branches to our path awaiting us.

We slowly climbed our way over rocks and trees to the shore where we wondered "salt water or fresh?" Taking a leap we found out it was a fresh water lake, but a WARM fresh water lake. Rationality and later dates thrown down with our clothes we dove, slipped in my case, into the glacial lake to an experience that will forever be tattooed with me. We couldn't believe the whim decisions life presented us with. Cold, but clear, refreshed, but sure, we splashed around until our blood instructed us to return to warmth. Dropping trou, and accidentally flashing some hikers, we returned to warm clothes and bolted for the town to get our tea on and regain a normal body temperature.

A quick bus ride home with an interlude at the only ATM on the island, we returned home with rain in our shoes, but the sun in our bodies (we got kinda burnt we learned) and made it home to await the darkness that wouldn't come.Nature decided that Volcom Jeans weren't here shtick and she permitted me to retrieve them from the shore, covered in seaweed and creatures, but mine in the end. Nothing you want gets lost, only taken for a moment. It is always there, just not where you want it. Now, after a necessary soup dinner, some vodka for warmth, and a sun that never sets, we're off to bed.

SO there you go. That's a midway review from above the Arctic Circle. Kelsey has one more week left, I have two, the Iceland with da fam and then back to Kingston, but before that Ottawa with Diana (woowoo!). Mom/Dad/Everyone, wait till you see the pictures from Lofoten, you might think twice about the West Coast. I've never seen so many bikers and Frenchmen up here, touring the winding roads that clutch the coast. It's magic up here, above the noise, above the smoke, above it all. No internet, no phone reception, just us.

Just us.