This is from my travel sketchbook. We went to Norway (we tried to go in 2020 but covid …2021 but covid …2022 but SAS airline strike …finally made it!). Mom and elderKid shared an interest in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault at the time of the initial planning, although Kid‘s interest in that has shifted more to photography (and many other things). But this is a place you can only visit from the outside. No matter—there’s so much else! 

We went to Tromsø for a few days, Longyearbyen for almost a week, on a ship around Svalbard for about a week, and then Oslo for a few days. 

Loved it. Every bit of it. Well, except the coffee. Mostly there wasn’t good coffee, except at the Husky Café (with actual dogs!) But food was good, desserts were great, temperatures were just what I love (especially on Svalbard). I released a geocaching trackable in Svalbard—which I’d had far a surprising and unexpectedly long time—it’s already gone to all sorts of places! (There’s a lot I have to learn about geocaching…) And my bird LifeList is So Much Bigger! (I haven’t gotten it to eBird yet, but I will. And even though I mostly used my fabulous binoculars, I did take a few photos and will try to get them to iNaturalist. (Trip photos are mostly taken by kid and mom, thankfully.)

So back the sketchbook: mostly made journal notes, but sketched a little bit, painted a little—this fox is not yet done, but is based on a photo we took. Need eyes and background and a few other details.

We saw the fox outside Longyearbyen (on the way back from  Bjørndalen) and have lots of terrible photos of her. She was super camouflaged against the scree field she was on. This particular fox is wearing a radio collar, but I don’t know who’s doing the research nor what they’ve learned yet.