The whole story started as usual. Marek called me in early November 2010 and ask me: “would you like to go to Lofoten?”. Since, this location was always on my travel agenda, I didn’t have to think twice to agree. We immediately started to plan what is the best time to go, and we kind of didn’t think about one little detail, to where exactly we should go. We just simply bought plane tickets to Tromso and didn’t even consider any alternative destination. We had a chance to regret our ignorance pretty soon, because Tromso is actually not in Lofoten, but is further north, something around 440 km away from the place we wanted to go.
When I informed Marek about this little bug in our plans he was a bit concerned, but being natural optimist, he told me “so what, we will have to drive a little bit longer, it will anyway take few hours only”. I was not really sure what few hours mean, but I didn’t argue with him. Finally the day “D” was here. We landed in Tromso on February 3, 2011 in the evening and we were ready to drive (for just few hours) to our next destination, little town called Svolvaer. It was exactly 21:25 when we put our destination to the navigation system and few minutes later we were speechless. According to GPS the estimated arrival time was 6:00 AM the next day. You can believe me that at that point I was really regretting our planning mistake.
When the first shock subsided we hit the road and after a while we were out of the city and everything looks okay, speed limit was 90 km/hour, not bad for night driving. However, after few kilometers we realized that the whole road is covered with one solid layer of ice, which was obviously not concerning for local drivers (trucks especially), but our car slowed down significantly and we were realizing that the estimated arrival time might be cruel reality. Fortunately for us, we managed to arrive one hour earlier than the GPS expected. To be totally honest; it was not due to our great driving skills, but due to new route, which was not included in the navigation system.
Sunrise is around 9:20 AM at this time of year so it gave us three hours of sleep and at 8:00 AM we were heading to our first spot. When the twilight started to reveal the beauty of Lofoten’s landscape we were slowly realizing that our dream become true and we are actually standing in the middle of landscape photographer’s paradise. I can imagine that for most people (including my wife) the definition of paradise is diametrically different from mine, but at that point I felt like there is no other place nicer that this one, and of course I didn’t anymore regret that we had to undergo such long and exhausting journey.
To be continued…