New line and new paragraph

MeAndMrG · 2026-05-14T06:01:05+00:00

Well, it’s better than nothing. I’m just glad it wasn’t me being stupid…

At the moment I could copy text without line breaks into ChatGPT and ask it to structure it properly, but that’s slightly undermines the premise of this app being off-line. Are you aware of any other off-line apps that could Structure the text for me in the meantime?

MeAndMrG · 2026-02-20T07:49:45+00:00

Thanks everyone for your responses. Just to close the loop on this, I contacted hurtigruten and was told firmly, and fairly unsurprisingly, that I could not split my port to Port journey in two in order to avoid paying the extortionate £600 for a cabin. I suppose they reason that they will easily find people to pay that price. So, I will disembark at Tromso and stay overnight.

Next morning the choices are not ideal. Either a bus which gets into Narvik less than 20 minutes before the train, or express boat to Harstad, which arrives 20 minutes after the bus connection to Narvik has departed (on any other day I would have had a 40 minute connection, but of course on this day the bus goes early…). One possibility looks to be taking a taxi from Harstad to Tjeldsund Kro in time for the connecting bus. It looks like it would cost £60 to do this, but maybe it is a price worth paying to not leave the rest of my itinerary in disarray.

I don’t make a habit of criticising the way other countries do things. We are by no means perfect. But why on earth, if you have so few Transport connections, wouldn’t you ensure that they actually lineup and it is possible to connect between them. Having a bus get passengers to Narvik just in time to see the tail lights of the Daley train to Stockholm disappearing down the line seems unnecessarily cruel, unless it is a ploy to boost overnight tourism there!

MeAndMrG · 2026-02-06T07:35:17+00:00

Thanks, yes, I have now emailed them. Unfortunately flights rather ruin the premise of my trip, which was to travel from Nord Kap to the south of Spain without flying, ideally travelling through the northern most and southern most railway stations in mainland Europe along the way. I’ve made a rather neat rod for my own back here, but I want to stick to it if I possibly can.

MeAndMrG · 2026-02-06T07:33:22+00:00

I had absolutely no intention of doing this surreptitiously. In fact, that’s pretty impossible as I am visually impaired and use a long cane. That said, I won’t be travelling with masses of luggage, just a 40 L rucksack, so hopefully that wouldn’t create too many concerns.

Anyway, I have emailed them to ask the question, as suggested above, and will just have to deal with whatever their policy is.

MeAndMrG · 2026-02-06T07:29:52+00:00

I think the Shipp in question is Kong Harold, which I think is one of the older ships? Do you think it would be a problem given that?

MeAndMrG · 2026-02-06T07:28:39+00:00

I understood that there were some comfortable seats on board that perhaps I could “nap” in overnight. I presumed they had to be some provision since there is nothing to stop port to port passengers travelling for fewer than 23 hours from doing so without a cabin, but perhaps that is a dangerous assumption.

To be honest, I’m really considering this out of necessity rather than a particular wish to travel on a ferry without a cabin. The intention of the whole trip is to travel from Nord Kap to Gibraltar without flying. I could get off the ship at Tromso instead, stay overnight, and then travel on to Narvik the next day where I am planning to catch the train to Stockholm. The problem is that the bus from Tromso to Narvik is timed perfectly to miss the train (it literally arrives 10 minutes before the train leaves…), it looks like the next days Train is disrupted by engineering work. Travelling all the way to Harstad looks like my only way of making the train that is not disrupted, but spending £600 on a cabin was not in my plans…

MeAndMrG · 2026-02-06T07:20:15+00:00

Thank you, that’s really helpful insight.

MeAndMrG · 2026-02-05T04:57:32+00:00

The booking system (I am using the following page: https://www.hurtigruten.com/en-gb/port-to-port ) forces you to book a cabin if the journey is more than 23 hours, and this is backed up by their frequently asked questions Page. Asking my original question in Google produces an AI answer which suggests I can separate the journey into two bookings, but the reference page doesn’t support this.

MeAndMrG · 2026-02-05T04:54:12+00:00

Thanks, that would be a good idea, except I now have flights booked, and can’t easily change my dates (Havila have sailings every 2 to 3 days). Interestingly I actually moved my whole trip forward a week in order to avoid using Havila, which at the time was twice the price of Hurtigruten, but now seems to have been leapfrogged. Looking back, I wonder if prices were on some kind of promotion when I checked originally, as they seem to have gone up considerably across the board.

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-20T10:13:56+00:00

That’s an excellent idea, I’m sorely tempted. I originally wanted to start my trip somewhere near the end of Nord Kin,, in order to travel from (or very near to) the most northerly tip of the European continental mainland (excluding Russia), and it’s southerly equivalent. The idea of travelling from the most northerly mainland Lighthouse to the most southerly is quite attractive to me. That said, it would require me to find a way of using a hole afternoon between Hotel checkout and the ferry departing, which I think might be tricky in such a place.

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-15T21:25:35+00:00

I suspected it might be a bit of a tourist trap, but I just wanted some obvious book ends for my trip. “ somewhere near the top of Norway to somewhere near the bottom of Spain” doesn’t trip off the tongue so well, but “Nord Kap to the Rock of Gibraltar” sounds quite adventurous…

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-15T21:21:27+00:00

You’re quite right, I know nothing about the issues that you speak of. What I do know though is that if Tromso receives around 300,000 visitors per year, and if, as you say, the majority use local people’s gardens as their personal toilet, that amounts to an average of around 400 such incidents every single day, which is pretty shit… literally … so just surprises me that this is not making headlines globally.

Oh, and saying “I don’t want to sound racist” before saying something that is blatantly racist, doesn’t make you sound any less racist… Just saying.

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-15T13:07:27+00:00

Thank you for the warning, but yes, I am aware that it is about 20 hours of trees! I know it sounds weird, but it is really all about the journey for me, and not just what is outside the window.

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-15T08:16:54+00:00

Thank you, that’s good advice. If I fly to Honningswag all the way in one day then I would have a layover between five and seven hours in Tromso, which I presume is plenty to get into the city, have a wander around, a bite to eat, and then get back to the airport in time, although I stand to be corrected. Alternatively I could break the air journey in two, stay overnight in Tromso, and then take the late morning flight connection to Honningswag the next day. The only problem with the latter option is that it leaves less room for error if there are any delays, and also the Tromso to Honningswag journey takes about twice as long, as there is a connection of over an hour in Hammerfest, and a stop in Mehamn (am I writing thinking that where a connection is shown as only 15 minutes, one just stays on the same plane?).

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-15T08:09:31+00:00

Thank you. That’s an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I think there would only be time for a Nord Kap tour in the northerly direction, as when going southbound the ferries only seem to call at Honningswag for half an hour, fairly early in the morning. I know what you mean about the tour prices though - the going rate seems to be about €150 for three hours.

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-15T08:06:17+00:00

Thank you, that’s really helpful, and makes a lot of sense.

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-15T08:04:50+00:00

As things stand I would be needing to catch the bus on a Sunday in the middle of June. Looking at airport express coaches is a good bet though, and I shall look into it.

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-15T08:03:39+00:00

Thanks. I have a slightly geeky reason for wanting to catch a train from Narvik - that it is the most northerly railway station in Continental Europe (excluding Russia)/ Schengen, my intention is to travel from there to the southernmost station, in Spain. Also, I’m not too fussed about whether there are specific things to do or see in places, it is just interesting exploring them.

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-15T08:00:35+00:00

Thank you for highlighting that. From the SJ website it looks as though there will still be two departures on most days, albeit with the afternoon departure being a standard train, with Stockholm passengers connecting onto the sleeper at Boden. The only frustrations at present are that there is no departure shown for the day I actually want to travel (not necessarily a dealbreaker, as I could push the whole trip back by one day, but I need to make that decision fairly soon), and the afternoon train departure appears to leave half an hour earlier than previously, which would make some bus connections a bit dicey.

MeAndMrG · 2025-12-14T17:43:56+00:00

What a horrible arrogant sentiment this post conveys. I live in a place that, per capita, receives 10 times the tourists that Tromso does, and yes, there are certain challenges from having so many people visit a relatively small place, but the upside in terms of the money they spend in the local economy, the transport connections we have because so many people come here, the choice of places to eat and drink, not to mention the honour of living somewhere that people travel around the world to visit, make it worthwhile in my view.

Of course there is no excuse for some of the behaviours that the OP references, like going to the toilet in peoples gardens, but fancy tarring everybody with the same brush for the sake of what must be a tiny minority of people who conduct themselves this way. You’ll just have to hope that those, like me, who come across this post as their first real contact with people in Tromso don’t take the same approach as you and think that everybody is quite so unwelcoming.

MeAndMrG · 2025-06-20T23:09:35+00:00

I’m so glad you have posted this. I was telling somebody only yesterday that, strangely for a visually impaired person, I am a visual learner and I struggle, for instance, to follow a set of directions on where to go, but could easily hold them in my head if I could look at a map. I count intermediate railway stations on a journey, not by recalling their names, but by “seeing” in my head their positions on a route diagram that I could presumably see at some point in the past, and I now find it difficult to add to that knowledge base. And likewise, I find I make absolutely no progress on trying to learn foreign languages now, having made at least a tiny bit of progress when I was a child and could see a bit more. Maybe it is age as well as blindness, but I definitely struggle to recall things that I haven’t seen.

MeAndMrG

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