Nordkapp is continental Europe’s northernmost point, at 71N, located in the county of Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county. In our first post from this stop I showed you the main town; today I’m showing you the marker above & below, plus some of the surroundings and various photos from the history exhibits and dioramas inside the museum, giftshop and cafe building. Before they built the road and museum, people had to rock up in boats and scale the cliffs: that’s one of the dioramas below :-). And yes, in 1907 the King of Thailand visited Nordkapp; as you see it was rather cold and windy when we were there so we enjoyed thinking of balmier climes…
Last Sunday all the kids and parents were out at Sloterpark, which we’ve been showing you a bit more recently. Since you enjoyed our last wooden “urban entrance” post from this same playground area, Jean, I took these with you in mind. 🙂
The first time we’ve shown you the outside of Chateau de Vincenne’s lovely cathedral, though in this series we’ve shown you its inside a few times already. 🙂
Another ode to lovely mornings by the Seine to begin…and then to business lol. A few days ago we promised to reveal how many bridges are in that photo from right next to my home in Amsterdam. There are three bridges within the frame of the photo, though in fairness only one of them is easy to discern in the bottom foreground of that photo, given its vantage point. I’ve photographed all three bridges in photos below, now from the perspective of my windows 15 storeys up. For reference, the photo I shared before was taken from the far right side of the first image below, looking towards Sloterplas and the third bridge which you can see below right, i.e. a bit below and left of anything you can see in the first image below. The second bridge is easily visible below left, and the first bridge is on the far right-center of the left-hand photo below, though what you see easily here is just the road surface as it crosses the mini canal en route to that street and construction site to my north. 🙂
Tap or click the individual images below to see them full size, if you want to make more sense of it. And since I’m linking Paris & Amsterdam in one post here and it’s the 750th anniversary of Amsterdam, we’ll do a wee historical ‘did you know?’ By and large NL (and trade-wealthy Amsterdam) managed to remain free of French dominion for hundreds of years, once in fact by purposely flooding fields to keep the ‘Sun King’ out. Only once did they succumb, to iced-over fields and Bonaparte. Who was himself beaten three times later on, first by the self-liberating humans formerly called slaves in Haiti, and then twice a decade and more later, by the English-Austrian-Dutch etc. coalition. Ah, the wheels of history.
And we’ll wrap up this week of bridges with two posts from Paris, where we began it all. This one’s all from Chateau de Vincennes. Its 700-year-old keep (above, with protective drawbridge) was built here well outside the city limits, at a time when France’s kings were feeling a bit vulnerable after a capture by the English and some demonstrations by angry peasants – most likely about the tendency of France’s wealthy dictatorial hereditary rulers’ tendency to underestimate the difficulty average people faced in feeding their families – near their city palaces.
From Bergen op Zoom in NL (last post) to Bergen in Norway as my plane approached just over a month ago above, and as our ship pulled out (below) to begin our journey on up to all the wonderful things I’ve been sharing with you from that Norway cruise. I don’t think these are the same bridge but can’t be sure b/c I wasn’t very well oriented, and they may in fact be the same…
Many bridges in Bellinzona; the one above connecting Castello di Montebello’s inner and outer courtyards, also seen in some below along with a few street bridges from my lovely hike between castles that day. If you missed it earlier, do check out our prior post explaining these castles.
(so much world, so little time....) 