Iceland, Norway, Russia 2015   

July 2015, Land of the Midnight Sun

We began our trip with five days in Iceland visiting some of Cheryl’s cousins in Keflavik and in Reykjavik.  The tourist boom is changing Iceland with many new hotels and a growing tourist infrastructure.  We then flew to Bergen, Norway for three days.  We had previously visited there during a camping trip to Norway in 1971!  This time we cruised the beautiful fjords and rode the scenic Flåm Railway across the mountains to Oslo.  We then flew north of the Arctic Circle to Tromsø, Norway where we boarded the 100-passenger MS Serenissima for an eight-day journey along the North Coast of Norway and into the White Sea of Russia.

As we traveled the North Coast of Norway, we visited North Cape, the northernmost point of Europe.  We visited rebuilt Norwegian towns destroyed by the Germans scorched-earth retreat during the final days of World War II.  In Russia, we visited Murmansk and Arkhangelsk ice-free ports used by the Arctic Convoys when the US, Britain, and Canada supplied equipment, ammunition and food to the Soviet Union during World War II. We toured Solovetsky Island with its Monastery dating to Czarist times.  Solovetsky Island was a part of the Gulag, the Soviet system of concentration camps and forced labor camps.  A former prisoners’ barracks has been converted to a museum and the area has many memorials and reminders of its grim history.