Unfortunately we had lectures. This, however, did not seem to stop a vast majority of students who had clearly skived off to go see the Sun. Damn them!
Stu and I had decided that we would scooter down to school and take a trip out onto the fjord in the two hours we had for lunch to get some snaps of EISCAT and the Sun on the mountains. It was also a good place for me to test out driving our scooter as it is relatively flat and has a good “scooter highway”. After taking the scooter down to UNIS we had two hours of lectures with Anja Strømmer who, although has the worst part of the course to teach us (the math), is a very nice person and a really good teacher. I was not feeling very well again as my internal thermostat seemed to be playing up, however, felt slightly better when we headed out to take the scooter up the fjord.
Stu drove first as I had never driven our scooter before and never driven a scooter with someone on the back. We took the scooter route along the road like we did on scooter training but instead of heading off across the fjord like we did before we carried on heading further up towards mine 7. When we reached the old aurora station Stu and I swapped around giving me the chance to try out driving on a flat “road” instead of up a glacier or something equally as ridiculous. I was covered head to toe, having put my goggles on a couple of minutes before as my eyes got cold, so did not feel how fast we were going at all. That was until I got a rapid tapping on my shoulder from Stu who quickly pointed at the speedometer showing me that we were going over 70 and into the red, which would eventually make the scooter very angry. Slowing down and keeping an eye on the speed we followed the scooter track in a sweeping curve across the fjord eventually deciding to come to a stop somewhere in the middle.
I really liked driving the scooter and found it much more stable sitting at the front driving than at the back, something that Stu was happy to confirm with me (he didn’t like being a passenger much, he assured me it was not my driving). It was also made easier considering it was really flat terrain and we were following a well-used scooter track so I had no doubts about direction. Also a bit of speed never killed anyone!
We pulled over to the side (the right, wrong, side over here) and got out the cameras to take some pictures. I had remembered to pack the video camera though its resolution is not great it in some ways does appreciate the light more. As we were down in the valley and completely surrounded by mountains as far as the eye could see, and it was a very clear day so that is pretty far, we could not directly see the Sun. We could, however, see the sunlight on the tops of some of the mountains its light casting a pink glow on the peaks.
Looking back towards town we realized just how far out we had driven in just 20 minutes as you could only just see the power station chimney. All the more reason to bring the rifle out with you as we had passed the dog pens about 10 minutes back and that is where a Polar Bear was spotted on Tuesday so…
We had a really good vantage point up to EISCAT and Stu got some good picks with his uber lens.
After standing around for a bit and getting a pic of us on the scooter we started to get really rather cold so decided that it was time to head back. Stu drove the whole way back as, although I had loads of fun driving, I really don’t mind being the passenger. On the way back I attempted to film us driving by attaching the gorilla pod to the bottom to give me something to hold onto. This, however, did not work as my hands still got insanely cold, and when we went over a particularly harsh bump it flew out of my hands hitting the snow at 50 km/h. running back to pick it up I saw that it had shut down so unfortunately did not capture the fall on video, though it would just have been a whole lot of white. We headed back to UNIS pretty quickly as at this point my legs were getting insanely cold due to the fact that they stick out substantially more than when driving and do not have the front of the scooter to channel the wind around them.
It was a really cool scooter trip in the light and gave us something to do whilst still being jealous of those seeing the Sun. Maybe we will go up on the weekend.
This is one of my flatmates Vegard standing at the top of Trolstein with the Sun while he happily skived off from school.
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