Bought a Troll today...

Not too many days in your life you can say that....

• [By the way, for those of you who are not so technologically advanced... where there are words highlighted in a different colour, you can click on them and you will be taken to another website that has some video of where it is we've been. I am using other people's video as it takes a good deal of time to upload video, and I'm lazy, so if you see other people in 'our' videos, don't be alarmed...!]

I am convinced that there is no bad view of or over Bergen. We rode up the fenicular 850 metres to a lookout/restaurant/forest walk kind of place... Fløyen. Then went to the Hanseatic Museum and the Rosencrantz Tower - see about 2.28min in this vid... dating back over 900 years. Aust feels so young...
The fish markets smelt as you would imagine, but other than that, Bergen has such an iceberg clean kind of smell. The forest up the top of the hill was mossy, with tall pines and birch trees. We rounded a lake where 3 strapping young lads had just taken a 'bath'. They looked sufficiently braced against the cold, with the more malleable apendages retreating to warmer climes... They said that they were camping for 3 weeks. This may have been their first wash. In this part of Europe one can camp for free on any public land.
We have been particularly lucky with the weather, as Bergen just broke it's own record for the most days in row that it has rained... over 100! They average just under 2.5 metres of rain/year.
It doesn't get really really dark here till after 11pm, so the kids are living a little more at the end of the day than usual... for eg, Jude and Helga are out for a walk now and it's just after 10pm... but just the beginning of twilight. At the height of summer they really only get 2 hours of semi darkness - midnight til 2am.... makes it great for sightseeing... but hard to get the kids to bed...
Zoe bought a moose finger puppet today... and for some reason chose to call it 'Seagull'. Can't quite predict how she'll go on this kind of thing... I hope she marries well.
Tuesday just gone, we spent the day on a ferry pottering up some of Norway's most famous fiords... the Sognefjord [pronounced Sogg-ne-fiord]. The longest fiord in the world at 204km. The weather was quite moody, perhaps taking it's lead from our youngest, but it only enhanced the drama of the setting - unlike our youngest! People have built their houses in the most incredible places... and we continue to be amazed at how this planet shows us its maker [sorry, a little bit o' religion there...]
Make sure you have a look at our online picture album every few days, as sometimes I upload more pics to the same album... I am just about to load some shots of the fiords and Bergen fenicular....