Sankthansaften in Grimstad

23.06.2009

Norge

Grimstad is about four hours south of Oslo down the west coast of the Oslo fjord, and it's the home town of Reidar. It's also the hometown of Thor Hushovd—2009 Tour de France green jersey winner, for those of you who care.

So we came to Grimstad over the midsummer festivities. It's not really a festival but everyone does stuff. In this case we happened to be in a coastal town where everyone had boats or access to a boat or, in our case, a 30ft yacht.

So we did what every other Norwegian in the area does; sail out to a small rocky island in the archipelago and grilled some sausages.

Leaving the docks

The Grimstad harbour.

Erik, Reidar's bro

Rannveig

Some small hut

If I owned this, I'd be checking the metrics on global warming/sea levels etc closely...

Docked at the rocky island

Sausages await.

The floating deck

This was a great invention. Someone had just put some floats and a small outboard motor on what was essentially an outdoor decking. It had everything. A full 'webber-style' barbeque, music and about 20 drunk people.

Sausages and lens flare

Because it was the longest day, the sun lingered near the horizon for hours...

All the boats

Everyone parks next to each other and back in the day they used to have races running across the boats

Ice cream

This was extremely random. The outer most point of the island - looking out to Denmark, and we spotted a teenager out in the open ocean in his blow up boat selling ice cream. Well strange location but we bought some anyway.