23rd July 2016. Evenes, Norway.

We were going to move on to the Vesterålen Islands today but the weather was beautiful and so we decided to stay another day and chill out.  We had breakfast out in the sun and watched a German man wash his van by the drainage point.

When we’d finished breakfast we wandered down to the sea, drank coffee and paddled our feet.

Across the other side of the bay we could see a couple of motorhomes parked up last night and decided maybe we should join them, that way we get to see the view from a different angle.  We packed up, serviced the van then copied the German man and washed it before heading off for our shortest trip between stops so far, 5 minutes!

The parking spot was on a little headland with beautiful views over the fjord on both sides and it turned out to also be home to lots of bunkers from the war and a huge piece of art at the end.

The art installation was shaped like a tent but had ‘stone age’ paintings inside.  It was made by artist Bjørn Nørgaard in 1995 and entitled The Stone Church.

We spoke to a German lady who had a dog with her, a cross Collie Labrador and something else.  The dog looked like a small version of Inke the lady said she though it might have been a Hovawart when she was a puppy.  The lady was a vet and had been working in Sweden for two years and was having a three month tour of Norway prior to taking a new job in Jokkmokk, she was thinking about trying to get a job in Norway.

She was making the most of the sun like us and she was hoping that one of the fishermen on the beach would give her some fish for her tea. We sat with coffee overlooking the headland and she walked down there with her dog then disappeared over the bluff……… she came back holding a fish!

Earlier we’d seen two girls carrying blankets and bag go down to the water with their ‘fishermen’ boyfriends and apparently when one of the boys offered up his catch to his girlfriend she said “Yuk!” so the vet asked if she could have it and came back up the hill sporting her prize!

She went back down with chopping board and knife to gut it.

In the meantime a Norwegian man came and chatted to us about what had happened in the areas we where currently in during the war.  He told us he’d been an extra in a film and played a Russian soldier at which point the German lady’s dog appeared and started to lick him.  He showed us two spots on a dog to stroke that really chills them out, she stretched forwards, laid down and went to sleep, until her owner came back with the fish.

We mentioned the stone ‘tent’ on the headland and he told us that a lot of people weren’t happy about the many art installations that had been commissioned and placed throughout Nordland, he said they had cost a lot of money which could have been used for greater purposes.  I Googled it later and this is a small section of the information on sculpture-network.org:-  Artscape Nordland was an international art project that aimed to bring art to the places people live. There are only a few art museums in Norway. Furthermore they are far away in the sparsely populated district of Nordland. That’s why the project created a collection of publicly accessible sculptures…..  In the nineties, the project created a lot of local and regional debate and controversy. Some thought that nature in Nordland did not need any art works. Others did not like the fact that public money was used for art.

* We didn’t know it at the time but we were to see another of the installations in Eggum a few days later.

When we’d finished our interesting conversation with the man we walked back to the van and called Morgan, we had a lovely surprise when we discovered that Gethan and his friend Andrew were with Morgan, it was so lovely to chat to them all.

In the evening I went out with my camera to photograph the beautiful moon.