We were going to have a quiet day as we had our Northern Light’s tour booked for later in the afternoon. So after a leisurely breakfast where I had my first fry-up it was time to do some laundry. There aren’t any launderettes on deck 9 so I was tasked with finding the launderette on deck 8, it wasn’t too difficult to find and there was an empty machine, so I kicked off the washing before disappearing, setting my watch to the allotted 47 minutes that the washing machine said it was going to take. When I returned the only dryer was in use, so I headed up to deck 10 to that launderette and found that all of the dryers there were free, so I set off the the dryer and headed back to the room to get my whites and kicked off that as well. Today was going to be a good day for laundry.
We had an early lunch, we wouldn’t make Dinner as we had to be at the Arctic Circle tour office for a pickup by 17:45 and we’d planned to supplement our calories with Afternoon Tea in the Grills Lounge at 16:00. Lunch was really nice, I’ve been told that the confit duck cottage pie is excellent, so I ordered it and I can confirm it is very nice, Jane had one of her all-time favourites, spaghetti carbonara.
After lunch we relaxed until it was time for Afternoon Tea. It’s a bit of a Cunard tradition for white gloved waiters to serve Afternoon in the Queens room at 15:00 every day. Grills passengers can also take it in the Grills Lounge on QM2, on the other ships it is served in the Princess Grill dining room for Grills passengers. The tea consists of cups of tea, with finger cut sandwiches and various small cakes as well as the famous fruit scone with clotted cream and jam. The finger sandwiches were a little dry around the edges, but very edible and the small cakes were very nice. The scone did come with clotted cream, but it was a very small portion and it really wasn’t enough to counter the sweetness of the strawberry jam, it was still very nice though.
Suitably replete we went back to the stateroom to prepare to head out into the snowy North. Merino base layers, fleece lined walking trousers and a fluffy jumper, hat, gloves and a big coat. After all this had been donned, we headed to get the Shuttle Bus to the centre of Tromsø, The Ami Hotel where we were to join the tour was about half a mile from the drop off. Not far, but it was very icy underfoot and part of the route was up a steep set of ice covered steps. Jane had almost got to the top of the steps when her feet started to slide backwards, so I had to go back and rescue her as she clung onto the handrail for dear life, panicking that she was going to slide back down the hill.
We made it to the Ami Hotel eventually and signed in for our expedition with Arctic Circle Tours where we were booked into their Minivan tour. There are 7 guests in the very comfortable van rather than the 15 in the minibus. Jane wanted to make sure that they would be able to drop us off at the QM2 on the way back after her harrowing experience of walking in snow earlier. It turns out that they would have happily have collected us from the ship anyway as they were heading there to pick up the remaining four passengers. The final guest was a no-show so after David our driver introduced himself we headed to QM2 to pick up four Australian friends who made up our party. I had asked David what our chances of seeing anything given the heavy cloud cover and he was quite cagey, saying anything could happen as the weather changes so fast in these high latitudes, spoiler alert, it didn’t. We drove about 65 kms North, about an hours drive to one of the coastal sites where the chances were deemed to be highest, a fact borne out by there being lots of Northern Lights tours all converging on the same place. Once David had found a suitable parking space along side the minibus group, he went about setting up the campsite. This consisted of a heated toilet tent, bonfire area and a bunch of camping chairs, and we settled in for a bit of Aurora spotting. David kept us fed throughout, we grilled sausages and marshmallows over the campfire, drank lots of hot chocolate and devoured chocolate and doughnuts. Even though we never saw any evidence of the Aurora we were kept entertained, but eventually even all the hot food and drink couldn’t keep the cold out and we called it a day returning to the ship about midnight, where we went straight to bed.
