Advance payment

Thursday Sept. 14 - afternoon and evening
It has been my experience that you have to pay in advance for good things to happen to you. Thus it is today, after a remorseful SAS person lets us wait for our flight to Narvik in the comfort of the executive lounge. The subsequent flight is less than two hours, filled to the brim with other passengers stranded by the strike. As we begin our descent, we see the Lofoten Islands shimmering in the sunshine, and we know our luck has turned.

We get a cool nail-polish-red Peugeot,

with a registration plate that starts with ZA (for Zaffy 🐺) - another good sign, and we're off on our two hour drive to the Vesterålen Kysthotell. The sun is as strong as on Easter Island - if you happen to look at it directly, black spots dance behind your eyelids for a long time - and view after view compel us to stop and take photos, while huge trucks shudder by, way too close, on the two-line highway.

We drive through Sortland, where my great-grandmother was born, but only stop to explore the possibility of getting a SIM-card, a very elusive item in Norway, as we know from our visit last year. We will explore the town later, since all roads lead through Sortland on this part of the islands. The air is crystalline and and still quite warm with the sun - about 13 degrees - and the water absolutely still and transparent, perfectly mirroring the landscape above

The hotel is charmingly located at the water's edge on a tiny island outside Stokmarknes,

with an ancient stuffed polar bear in the lobby - look at the size of him!

As we accomodate ourselves the sun begins to set gorgeously over the silvery water.

I have my SIM-card assistance hopes set on a 25-yr old Latvian waiter called Emil, who's said to be good with IT, but he too has been stumped in his personal efforts to acquire a card. Meanwhile, as the sky darkens, we realize there's a real chance of northern lights.  We're having dinner when Emil fetches us. "It has begun," he says. "You're lucky." Outside, where it is now quite cold, and the ground drenched with dew, we see ghostly floating shapes move across the night sky. The shapes stretch horizontally and then jagged in a vertical line towards the horizon. At times we sense greenish, sharper folds, but they do not linger. "Verweile doch, du bist so schön," said Goethe (one of the very few quotations that I remember, but which applies here).

The iPhone can do many things, but not, as far as I can see, take pictures of northern light. Maybe they are too faint. Lise, the woman in the reception, suggests we move out on the island by car, beyond the lights, but we're tired after a long day, and have also had a glass of wine. Tomorrow we will sleep in Nyksund on the western tip of the island. Who knows, we'll get lucky again?