We Like Rugged: Traveling in the Arctic Circle

When friends ask us for travel recommendations, we start with a warning: We don’t travel like a lot of other people.

Maybe it comes from countless viewings of the 1960s classic movie Two for the Road, where Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney as two young newlyweds rough it through Europe … and make it look so appealing.

We don’t want luxury hotels when we travel, hired cars, day spas or air-conditioned buses filled with whiny Americans.

We want the real thing.

Sure, we loved the typical picture postcard scenes and popular tourist attractions in Copenhagen, Bergen, Oslo and Stockholm that we visited with a group of 15 American men (and one Brit) traveling on a Detours gay travel adventure. (Photo courtesy of Brandon Folkes, Detours Travel, during our bike tour of Copenhagen.)

But after that tour, Ted and I struck out on our own.

We went north, into the Arctic Circle.

We loved being with those guys in the tour group, but some quiet time afterward was nice, too. And we enjoyed seeing sights like the one in the photo at the top of this blog: tiny Arctic fishing villages where the avalanche guards on the mountainsides are the most interesting architectural feature.

Here’s another view of the Arctic Norwegian coast:

It’s just so wonderfully stark, isn’t it?

And chilly, though not as cold as we expected, or packed for.

It was in the low 50s, particularly welcome summertime temperatures … especially when the folks back home were posting online about 100+ degrees in Atlanta.

Travel the way we like it might mean staying in the tiniest hotel room we’ve ever occupied in Tromso, Norway, that small gem of a city known as the country’s cultural capital in the Arctic Circle.

It also means going to some very cool places off the beaten path.

Like the town of Narvik, reached by this slender-is-an-understatement bridge below.

We traveled there on an overnight train from Stockholm.

The train went through prime hiking territory. At every stop, backpackers happily disembarked or boarded the train for their next destination.

We had a sleeping car with three berths and a roommate named Viktor, a Swedish ski instructor in winter and hiking expedition leader in summer.

He was extremely polite … went to bed when we did. Woke up when we did. And snored very softly in his upper berth most of the night.

He also spoke English, and recommended things to do when we reached Narvik.

The town has an amazing museum that chronicles the Battle of Narvik in WWII, when nearly 7,500 Norwegian soldiers bolstered by British, French and Polish troops fought the German occupation. It was Norway’s toughest battle of WWII.

This blunt graphic tells the cost of the Norwegian campaign.

At issue was valuable iron ore transported by rail from Sweden. Whichever side secured Narvik’s ice-free harbor in the North Atlantic secured the iron for their own steel production. The Germans eventually retreated, but their occupation of Norway took a heavy toll on the northern part of the country.

Travel is indeed about learning new things.

That evening, we had a dinner of reindeer stew at our hotel’s rooftop restaurant overlooking the city … where we appreciated the views of Narvik as well as its historical significance, especially considering that we’d never heard of the place before our trip.

The next afternoon, we hopped on one of the local buses that travel daily from Narvik to Tromso, 250 km north.

The scenery on the four-hour ride was splendid.

It was a picture-perfect afternoon.

Despite the tiny hotel room, Tromso and the surrounding countryside were wonderful.

We were there four nights, took some great excursions each day–caught fish, cracked king crab, hugged sled dog puppies and ate a flaming pizza.

But more on Tromso in my next Arctic Circle blog …

coming soon from Mike & Ted’s Travelogue headquarters.

Meanwhile, wherever you are, travel light, my friends!

Note: You can find Narvik and Tromso near the top of the map of Norway below. (Downloaded free from GISGeography on September 25, 2023.)