traveldiary.stracke.us

We have to go (fly) the extra mile(s) to get to Marseille, our summer vacation destination.
It is Thursday, June 26, and we are in Newark Airport, trying to check in with Air Canada. I had booked our flight on December 4, 2007, taking advantage of an excellent airfare to fly Air Canada from Newark to Paris, connecting in Montreal. This fare was actually less expensive than the non-stop flight from Montreal.
This is all academic now. We are being informed, that the Newark-Montreal flight has been canceled (for the third day in a row). We are going through the usual tug-of-war negotiations with the gate agent: I decline offers to fly the next day or fly on Air Portugal via Lisbon later that night. We are going through all the Star Alliance partner airlines. United has a flight from Dulles Airport, Lufthansa from Newark via Munich. By the time the agent tries to ticket and confirm our new flights, the seats are gone.

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Midnight Sun, a romantic term, a natural phenomena, that I always wanted to see. It is beautiful! But the days seem to go on and on and on. Anywhere above the Arctic Circle, you have at least one full day of daylight in the summer, so all of the Scandinavian countries enjoy this wonderful gift of nature. In Narvik, we were well above the Arctic Circle latitude, so the sun here does not fully set between the beginning of June until the beginning of July. Since Lothar had broken his watch, he was living in a type of twilight zone, never knowing what time it was. Every few hours, he’d venture the question about time and at each incident, he was surprised to hear the answer. His body clock and the sun clock just didn’t jive. We spoke to some locals, especially an engineering student, who was living in our B&B, and he told us that the Scandinavian people had this same problem, no matter how long they had been living here. I would have thought that people adjust more readily.
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We had enjoyed the midnight sun, sitting on the rooftop terrace at the Breidablikk Gjesthus on our first day north of the Arctic Circle. The Arctic Circle is at a latitude, where the sun never sets for at least one day of the year. At our latitude here, there are about 2 months of continuous daylight and our body clocks are all messed up !
We went to bed around 1 AM. Gabi wanted to make sure, that she knew the location of the light switches in our room, just in case she had to get up during the night. We were laughing when I reminded her, that light switches are not needed here this time of year !
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