One week to go!

Hard to believe, but we’re in the home stretch.

We drove back to Narvik from Gällivare, stopping off in Kiruna, a major mining- and space-industry city in northern Sweden.  The mining is so active here, in fact, that they have decided they need to move the entire city!!  It was first built in the early 1900s, and was Sweden’s first “model community”, with streets aligning with natural features rather than on a grid, and with many neighborhood centers, rather than one big downtown area.

Here are a couple of articles about how and why one goes about moving a city of 23,000 people:

http://m.theepochtimes.com/n2/world/entire-city-of-kiruna-sweden-to-relocate-314470.html

http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674as_the_mine_goes_so_does_this_arctic_mining_town/

In driving around Norbotten, we noticed these distinctive buildings next to the railway.  These are from three different places…Kiruna, Torneträsk village, and Vassijaure.  They seem to have fallen into disuse to a large extent, though some have been repurposed as community centers and the like.

Driving back to Narvik, it wasn’t raining as much as when we drove east, so we got some more pics of the landscape.  The “small” stones sitting on top of smoothed-off rocks were left behind as the glaciers melted, dropping their cargo of stones.

And we’re apparently still not totally sick of waterfalls:

And just in case you’ve been longing for your very own Norwegian troll, there’s one for sale here: