It turns out the aurora came back for a second encore. Apparently after we left the Arctic circle the solar wind strengthened again and there was a good two days of impressive lights but we were too far south to get a good view. We could see it but it was low on the horizon and smallish. However I did get a bunch of short, high ISO exposures and I was able to string them into an animated gif.
We arrived in Bergen in the early afternoon, got on a bus and then on a sequence of airplanes and got back to London. This time we decided to leave Mom’s big suitcase at the airport bag storage since we were only going to be there one day. The next morning Mom got up and went to St. Paul’s and I slept in. Then we went to the Natural History Museum and then to Piccadilly Circus for touristy shopping and gawking.
The next morning was back out to Heathrow and then onto another series of planes including a two hour delay at O’Hare with a gate change, a plane swap, calling in a standby flight attendant and getting airborne only a couple of hours ahead of an incoming snow storm. Lesson learned: Chicago is the airport of last resort and you should not try to connect through it unless you have no other options.
I finally got back home yesterday afternoon and today Bill and I are going to attempt to bottle our beer after five weeks in secondary fermentation (three weeks longer than expected).