Monday 30 October

Haugesund is nearly at the southern tip of Norway. We have by-passed Bergen on the return trip and pulled in here to refuel. There’s not a lot to this town, but we always enjoy the unpolluted fresh air which is bracing and must surely be good for us. Cherrie is very patient with me, walking slowly as I do, and we tend to take a different route than other passengers. We take the back streets

We walk over the bridge to town, or at least half the bridge to look at town. We see what we want to see from there

and so we turn back, and gaze through a wire fence into a very large factory. The worlds biggest off shore wind farm is being constructed here and boy, those turbines are big, at 260 metres tall. That’s twice the height of the London Eye and the same height as the Rockefeller Centre in NYC. Stage one has opened, in the North Sea off the NE coast of England and the farm will eventually power up to 6 million homes annually.

We also saw a giant oil rig being constructed, which particularly interested Cherrie, as she was the first woman in Australia to board an off shore oil rig in NW Western Australia in 1981. All in a days work.

We came across rehearsals at HATS, the Haugesund Amateur Theatrical Society for Maids of the Fjords and were coerced into joining in

We were, of course, triumphant and Hildegard, the Director, begged us to stay in town so we could be part of their extended season, 2pm and 6pm on Wednesday, but alas we were forced to turn them down. There just wasn’t enough cod in it for us.

But the best fun to be had was when we sat down with Pat and Jeremy

The day finished with another magnificent sunset