Today's breakfast was a bit better as although we were in a cheapo hotel,it shared the restaurant with a four star. This meant that they had sausages on tap amongst other goodness. With breakfast over we rolled out, only for Martin to meet his doppleganger working there.
Not long out of town we pulled over for some pics and Martin walked off so far that we think he went back to the hotel, Mark sent the drone looking for him but he was too far out of range.
We then made our way onwards stopping approximately every 400 yards to take photos. It was Stuart's turn to fall over today, while walking through the snow, which was 2-3 inches deep, his one leg found a bit that was as deep as his knee and over he went. Mark and Keith were back at the car some distance away and still heard him swearing.
We've noticed that whenever we find somewhere to stop, we pick a nice quiet spot, yet 10 seconds later about 200 hundred Japanese tourists armed with selfie sticks turn up and photobomb every picture. To combat this we've turned all of our GPSs off so that they cant track us. We've gone dark!
We've been doing a lot of miles but even so, we've been using ALOT of petrol. In fact, we'd probably use less petrol if we just cut a 2 inch hole in the bottom of the fuel tank and pissed it all on the floor.
As we were reaching our first destination of the day, the blue sky's did one and it started lashing it down. We were rendezvousing with a firm that was taking us on a tour of some ice caves in a car park, sounds dodgy but was actually legit. It just happens that this car park was next to a lagoon full of icebergs which was gorgeous. It would have been even better if it wasn't raining and sub zero temperatures, but we didn't let that stop us.
We met with our tour guide who was going to take us to the ice caves and he pointed us to the monster truck that we were using to get there which was a Ford Transit on some steroids that a Russian athlete would be proud of.
It was about a 30min ride to the caves, most of which was off road, Mark had bagged the front seat but after a couple of mins on the rough terrain, one of the American girls on board was sick so she had to be moved to the front. Stupid selfish attention-grabbing yank. Cederic quizzed the guide if he'd ever been to the caves before (?!?), to which he'd replied that he'd been once before. Today. And another 200 times earlier this winter.
Once we arrived at the ice cave the American made a full recovery, how convenient. So we pushed in front of her and entered the caves. They were stunning, the roof had a blue glow to it where light was shining through the glacier, and the whole place was just jaw dropping with fantastic ice formations. Obviously as soon as we'd arrived a coach load of Japanese tourists somehow arrived and plastered the ice walls like cheap wallpaper.
We spent about an hour in the caves before going out and trekking up the glacier, Keith found it impossible to fit the crampons over his giant clown like feet, it took three people in the end to get them on. It was cold on the glacier, and our planned snowball fight was impossible as it was just solid ice. So we tested smashing ice on our helmets instead.
We headed back to the car park and drove down to the beach, it was still raining but this beach had icebergs crashing into it, so it was very pretty. We managed to not get soaked this time and only about a dozen Japanese followed us so it was quite a nice stop.
The day was getting on so we gunned it to our accommodation which was a guest house run by this lovely lady who just wants to mother us. Stuart sat down with her and listened to her stories while Mark plotted ways to take advantage of this. I shit you not, 5 mins after we got there a Japanese couple turned up!
We were starving, so we chose one of the five restaurants in town and had a corking meal. Keith and Martin took advantage of us being in a fishing village and ordered fish, but this still cost the same as the national debt of a small country.
After dinner we had an important planning meeting to figure out where and when to see the northern lights and where to go on our journey tomorrow. Keith and Martin had an in depth conversation about the visibility of the northern lights, with Martin using satellite and Live data from NASA whereas Keith was using his Yahoo! weather app.
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