This was the day that Alex had been looking forward to, the boys had been planning it with military precision for weeks, and to be honest, the day I was least looking forward to.
Up at 7 and down for coffee before breakfast had even opened, and the views were spectacular as the clouds had broken overnight, the sky was blue and the sun was shining.
Breakfast done, 2 rucksacks packed with enough food and water to feed a small army we set off, leaving here by 9am.
The aim, the great plan, was to go for a walk. They'd warned me that it was going to be long and up a mountain "about the same height as Snowdon", or about 1231m above sea level. What they didn't say is that you tend not to start at sea level for Snowdon, but about 350m, or a third of the way.
I'm someone who hasn't done a lot of walking over the past couple of years, so knew it was going to be very hard, but also very easy to just want to give up, something I didn't want to do.
Before we'd even got through Narvik to the start of the trail, I was panting, sweating and ready to fall by the wayside for them to come and collect me on the way home.
Well, I didn't, and we walked up, walked past streams, reservoirs, trees, and many, many boulders the size of cars.
They wanted to go up a particular mountain, called Biesfjordtotta, and, after about 6 hours of walking, as we pulled off the marked track to start climbing, we had to scramble up some near vertical rocks and for whatever reason I freaked, panicked and froze. I was pretty sure I didn't want to go up and fairly certain I couldn't go back down, and sure as anything I wasn't going to let my friendly solid rock I was holding go.
Well Sam stayed with me and calmed me down enough for me to get back down to the main track and they had a think about what we could do, having come so far.
The decision was made to go towards a different peak - Rombakstotta, and see how I coped, hoping there wasn't any vertical scrambling.
A couple more hours of walking, across a boulder field and I finally had enough. I'd come about 9km and ascended about 1km. The boys went on, climbing the last 200m (lots of scrambling involved) and got some amazing views from the top. This is a photo of them at the top, taken from where we were waiting. They are the two small dots about half way along the ridge.
We waited for them, a really good chance to recover enough to be able to get back down, and slowly made our way back to the hotel, arriving 13 hours after setting off, with some very sore legs.
Tomorrow is another travel day, we start moving south, out of the arctic circle back towards Germany.
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