03.07.2011 – 03.07.2011  5 °C

V Early start this morning as we had to have our bags packed and waiting outside of the door by 7am. Considering I didn’t make it to bed til after 2pm I was feeling pretty tired this morning! We had disembarked the boat by 8.30am and were in the hotel by 9am.

Unfortunately the hotel was full so we weren’t able to get in our room til after lunch so we had to kill the morning. Another complication was the fact that a huge cruise boat had also docked in the morning (probably 2000 people or so) so the little town of Longyearbyen was absolutely packed! You had to wait to get into the shops it was that busy!!! Knowing that we had plenty of time to kill we decided to find a warm spot in the lobby of the hotel and do some emailing/ reading.. Pls remind me next time that I go away for extended time without internet how long it takes to upload these blogs!! I swear I’ve spent >6hrs today uploading and still have some to go!!!!

Anyway the ship left at lunch time so we went for a walk after lunch to check out the shops we hadn’t seen. Longyearbyen is just one long street so it didn’t take us long to “do the strip” and so we returned to the hotel to do more blogging (in my case) and watched the Wimbledon final in conductor’s case.. you all know what bookie was doing 

The highlight of our day was dinner at this Norwegian hunting lodge-esk restaurant where we caught up with some of our other fellow trippers and had some yummy pizza. Tomorrow we are off for Tromso and part 2 of our arctic exploration trip!