Mosjøen, byen i midt av Norge.

So I am in Mosjøen, the town in the middle of Norway! The town in the middle of nowhere until we drove last night to Sandessjøen, a town on the edge of insanity, out there just at the edge of the world and the known universe, and to make it even more fun, they put it on an island. They had this rock called Norway, sturdy and strong, but needed to place the town at the edge of the universe on an island to make some point or another. One of the great things about all this Norwegian obsession (Skiing, tunnel building and making suspension bridges between rural areas) is this amazing semi suspension bridge from land, Norway, the known world out at an angle away from the town of Sandessjøen into the sea, quite literally the sea. The bridge leaves perfectly good land, and then heads boldly out into the unknown to a man made island of rock in the middle of the fjord, before the road, sweeps in this semi elegant ramp back towards the windswept town on a 1km causeway made of chippies! Most elegant but why? May be they just had a suspension bridge free, left over from some other crack pot scheme, or they are all made to a fix length in Norway and you have to make do. Who knows who cares, it was a very nice bridge! We went to town, it was windswept, and had all the feeling of a forgotten west coast town in Scotland, but with less hooligans and thus less culture. Another outstanding things was a hospital, it was huge, the kind of things a town of 100,000 in the UK would die for, literally. On this windswept and increasingly rain soaked island they have this hospital that services the entire area, or 10 people or so. It has Akute mottak (A&E to you and me) operating theatres, plastic surgeons hundreds of beds for sick people and loads of doctors walking around in white coats looking important (I didn't see any doctors I made that bit up, I just imagined a hospital of this size must have hundreds of white coated doctors).

After this extravaganza we drove back in gloomy weather, and heard the local weather station has closed as they said it it going to rain for eternity so what's the point of being a weather forecaster, boy it rains here. Anyway I notice some 30km from Mosjoen some cliffs and then a more solid cliff high above the road, so made a mental note, and today I returned in biblical rain to check it out. I had to wade through millions of water saturated bilberries to the base of the crag. Between torrential rain I counted 15 obvious lines with some desperate slab routes in between! If and when this rain stops I'll go back and bag the lot, and nobody can touch me for it! Or care for that matter! After all it will be known as the crag of 20m high in the middle of bloody nowhere, and who in the right mind would go there just for that.

Wait a minuet the weather! Its just started raining more heavily! And way do these locals have an obsession of building there west coast towns on Island, and know historically they have all been trying to leave but this is ridiculous.