Well you’ve got to do it some time and we’ve been on the road for ten days now so its probably somewhat overdue. Its a problem though in Scandinavia; there just aren’t that many laundries around the place. I think I saw one at a petrol station somewhere in Sweden and that was that. Campsites have them only rarely and we’ve done so much free camping out in the wilds now that we get a bit twitchy if we see another car on the road and are developing our own special dialect.  But anyway, back to civilisation in Stamsund which was twenty K down a narrow B road. The guide book said it had a youth hostel complex with laundry facilities and an utterly helpful manager who is delighted to Be of service. Well it has a youth hostel, but the person who ran it was adamant that we couldn’t use the washing machine. That’s fair enough I suppose so we went into the harbour area for a coffee and a little wifi to check out our options. The young woman who was serving couldn’t have been more helpful, giving us unlimited coffee and waffles and offering the use of their washing machine. She said they were closing the place for the winter in a few days time and she was off to India. We washed our clothes, got some groceries at the supermarket next door and  generally sorted ourselves out. We ended up with a large bag of wet laundry though as the cafe didn’t have a dryer, so we found one at a campsite 15K back down the road we had arrived on. As we drove, a sea fret set in obscuring the mountain tops with mist and casting a dull light over everything. The camp site was nicely set out but we didn’t really want to stay so we were delighted when the lady at reception gave us a token for the dryer and told us to help ourselves.

After a quick lunch and a bag of dry clothes were were back on the road to Eggum via, we hoped, a Viking museum in Bøstad. There was a sign saying it was 16K ahead, but when we got to Bøstad -which is blink-and-you’ll miss it kind of place- there was no indication of its existence at all. We turned off to Eggum where the road dead-ends at a wartime German radar station which tracked ships on the polar convoy via Murmansk. 

We all climbed it and spent an exhausting but exhilarating hour chasing around with Tom over the big boulders on the beach. Its a popular spot and a few campers have arrived. A man came and collected NK10 from us all to let us stay the night. Tomorrow we will  walk along the coast to the next village – weather permitting.

We’re hoping for a lie-in tomorrow. We were all woken at seven this morning by a large bird which stomped about on the roof making a loud shrieking noise, until I tapped the ceiling and it flew off, still shouting. We all sat in line to watch a movie (“Inkheart” – good fun) and now the sun has gone down and T is asleep in his bunk. We are headed to ours.