A warm, summer night in autumn 2025.

I do love me a seasonal playlist to remember a period of my life. And if some of the song lyrics/titles have a literal link to the specific season that I listened to them in - even better.

Lots has changed since my debut one in 2004. First, initially I had a lot more tunes to choose from in humanity's back catalogue. Second, I didn't make them every season, and third, the music listening experience was so different back before Spotify and endless mobile phone data. I feel like my standard for getting on the seasonal mixtape is a lot higher in 2025 than it was say in 2006. I also can't tell for sure if I look back fondly at every track that made a seasonal mixtape back in the day purely because it was on there. In the old days I would listen a lot to whole albums, playing them in my car where I couldn't change to another band on a whim. For the past few years I have had a staging process where anything I hear on an album or through the algorithm gets added to a "Liked from Radio" playlist (I forgot why I called it that back in 2016) and then usually when I'm feeling a tune on that list over a specific season it will get the call up to the seasonal.

Some tunes do hit my brain and go immediately to the seasonal as well.

By the time of Autumn 2025, I felt like making a mixtape for Autumn was tough. The main problem was that it was hot and sunny all the time. Summer lasted until April. Where was the weather I needed for enjoying some down tempo melodies, some darkness, the sound of rain on the roof?

The inverse of this problem was that I was scheduled to leave for Norway in early May, so whatever Autumn I was going to have had to be squeezed between summer finally ending and then.

Optimistically I named my playlist in Spotify Høst 25, which is Norwegian for "Autumn, 2025". And in March I added a couple of folky/dreamy tracks that gave me a feeling of what Autumn might actually vibe like. I also added a song called "Midnight Sun" from Jan Blomqvist's new album, for obvious reasons.

The reality of Autumn was a lot of moving house/selling house fun, ankle pain, and a month long cold. Plus some good tunes from Lawrence Hart, Brother Bird and Of A Revolution that had got me through some late night drives to the self storage or trips in the hire truck.

A 2m x 1m x 1m (approximately) solid chunk of an ending chapter of life.

By the time I took off for Oslo I had eight songs worth of Autumn and I thought I was either going to have to combine this with winter after I got back, or maybe release another seasonal EP (Summer 2022 was the first of those when I went arm first into the CBF).

A lot happened in Norway and I listened to a lot of music there but it certainly wasn't autumn.

On my last night in Lofoten, giddy with the heights of Reinebringen and the endless sunset and sleep deprivation I sought a playlist to soundtrack my drive back to Eggum and I started with Høst. Within about eight minutes I was listening to Midnight Sun while driving under a midnight sun and this was incredibly validating to me as a sign of my musical taste, sense of timing, and good fortune.

Because the drive was a lot longer than the short autumn soundtrack, after Gonna Be Me finished I switched to 2025's Liked From Radio and played it on shuffle.

There were a lot of good songs on that list and some I skipped. And the ones I didn't skip got instantly encoded with the vibrancy and energy of that drive along Lofoten's E10.

The sun still hadn't set when I arrived back in Eggum. Obviously. But autumn had ended. I was about to return to Adelaide for winter and a whole set of new releases and old life. But I wanted to do anything I could to hold on to that drive and that autumn where I pushed through pain and sickness to move house, sell a house, recover from injuries, work hard and then make it to glorious Norway for a life changing holiday.

So I added all the songs I'd just heard to the playlist in the order I'd heard them.

Autumn sunset colours in Adelaide, not Norway.

And now that winter is closer to ending than it is to starting, it's time to commemorate that decision and add Høst 25 to the list of seasons I've had the joy of experiencing with music.

A sensation occurs to me occasionally on this holiday. I power off the hire car in the parkering I scouted out earlier, walk into a building to collect a key and instantly I'm in the right place in a new town or fjord on the right date of the universe's chronology. This often happens after driving hundreds of kilometres. Over 26 days, fifteen locations, five flights, a dozen ferries, two dozen car charges, three dozen Circle K coffees, not once did I get the dates incorrect on my booking, or the location wrong on the drive… One time I got caught out by Circle K Automat - which didn't have coffee - but only once.

I'm not egotistical enough to deny that six months ago I barely knew what a fjord was, let alone which ones were worth visiting and the best way to move between them. And yet somehow I planned a month-long roadtrip using the internet down to the required level of detail to start the holiday. And once the holiday was operational, I ensured we would have the capabilities needed to meet the functional and non-functional requirements of having a nice time in Norway.

There are not many labels I feel a particular affinity too, but architect is one. I feel like it is my cognitive sweet spot to plan for the future and oversee execution. What are the functional requirements for a holiday to Norway? Climb this mountain, walk up to that waterfall, see this view, cruise that fjord. Take some nice photos. Non-functionals include transportation, shelter, food, communication, toilet stops, caffeine.

All of these requirements were met, and NFRs also met within my personal SLAs. I climbed cool mountains, experienced great waterfalls, beaches and other natural wonders. I witnessed impressive vistas and ferried us across many fjords. I hope I got a few good pictures… I drove 3449 kilometres in an EV, which doesn't include the ferry crossing although it does include the occasional circling of town trying to find a working charger. We never ran out of electricity, food, coffee or clean underwear. We had a bed every night although not always the ideal amount of pillows.

The downside to being so organised is that a times I did feel like I was executing rather than experiencing the moments on my overseas holiday. There were times while driving that what should have been novel felt eerily familiar because I'd already seen the same roads and sites on Street View.

As the final implementation steps are executed, and my plane comes in to land, I now conduct an internal retrospective on if this was a well architected holiday. What went well, what could be improved, and what should be done differently next time?

I wouldn't necessarily classify my Norway holiday planning as the waterfall approach, but the detailed design was complete before leaving. I do think there was a strong element of agile methodology to the actual days. Typically each location had a number of attractions or stories and then it was up to us to prioritise and deliver on these when we actually arrived there. For example, doing a walk when the weather was good, or after a cruise ship left.

Forward planning also helped meet the commercials; the budget would have needed to be much higher if we were booking accommodation the days before we arrived, and options would also have been more limited. Some of our stops were in particularly picturesque positions with panoramic views and good kitchens. A more flexible approach would have had merits too. If we didn't like a place, or if we wanted to linger or go further based on vibes, we could have done that.

One NFR is that we need to make 99.9999% of our connections. At work I'd call this availability, and, just like with infrastructure, there are definitely additional costs for such comprehensive reliability. It means I built full day buffers into each leg of the return trip in case of an outage or misfortune. Because everything went smoothly, this meant many hours waiting for the next plane or ferry in locations nowhere near as good as where we could have been, along with extra nights in hotels, extra transportation and more upheaval. One alternative approach would be to live with the stress of tighter connections, and let travel insurance handle any circumstances beyond our control. Riskier but more rewarding. The other approach is to ensure the holiday naturally begins and ends in a location with a major airport, so that the return home can begin from a good place.

One thing is certain, I am clearly ready for my return to work.

Technically 10:19pm Sun

I wasn't exactly sure how my body would react to 24 hour daylight. Having now experienced it, I would say that in the evening after dinner it is amazing for outdoor activities and photographic light. And at sleeping time, it is completely irrelevant. On road trips, in Norway, sometimes you can feel the melatonin kick in when you're driving through a long tunnel...

In Adelaide, I am awake during the light part of the day (save occasional nap and sleep in) and I sleep during a portion of the dark part. In the morning in summer I sleep for a portion of the light part.

Technically 2:45am sun.

In the Arctic Circle, the slightly less light part is called nighttime and so you can associate that with sleep.

One guy I drove past at 10:30pm associated it with a great time to mow the lawn.

I will say that if you do want an argument for 24 hour daylight being unnatural, that I have now seen sheep and cows eating grass and walking around at 2 in the morning so it does feel like some level of human self control is required to regulate your behaviour and not do too much eating or photography when the light is low.

Or maybe they were just lawn mowing too...

Lofoten is an incredibly photogenic place that has exposed how average I am at photography.

While I like some of the photos I've taken so far, I feel like I have failed to capture some of the dramatic scenery. Especially when driving around, where every mountain looms and the water shimmers when the sun is out. The photos look flat. And sometimes the photos are taken just by stopping on the road and sticking the camera out the window. So they're the same angle. (This typically happens on the back roads, which are one way to find the secret places, but like the first of many layers of secret tracks). For example, one of my favourite photos here was only taken because I saw some locals taking photos a few metres off the road right before a tunnel. When we returned that way and got out of the car and went through a gate it revealed this amazing view.

A lot of the hiking is also challenging, even without the rain that rolls in, and the problems finding a place to park.

The one trick I have learned to far is to get in the car and drive when it's raining, in order to get to walk in the sunshine. The rain does come in waves, so unless the walk is right next to your shelter, getting to the start point with the wipers on has had good results.

The colours here are fantastic. And the sun is always somewhere, behind you, in front of you, to the side. You can never run out of light.

Mo I Rana is just south of the Arctic circle. It's still pretty chilly there, even at the end of May. I tried to jinx it into not raining by wearing my raincoat, which worked until I mentioned to Vanessa about the jinxing which then jinxed me and it started raining. We visited Havmannen who was not wearing a rain jacket and had a gull shitting on his head.

The Highlight of our Visit

The sun also technically set at 11:57pm. There were limited forms of twilight between then and about 3am when the sun came through the curtains and into my eyeballs again.

After breakfast we drove on North. During a break in the rain I ate an apple and nuts at a rest stop. Not the most atmospheric apple I've eaten on this trip, but in Norway even a dumpster at a highway rest stop can look scenic.

Shortly after that the battery indicator on the dashboard was draining fast and I realised we were ascending (himmelfarting) again. Sure enough, the landscape changed to snow and I was forced to pull over to go for a jolly down to a river cutting through snowfield. I caught sight of the back half of a freight train as it cruised down the hill back the way we'd come; familiar Norwegian supermarket brands with their brightly coloured shipping containers contrasting the black and white into which they disappeared.

It was as we kept driving through the snowscape where we appropriately entered the Arctic Circle.

After that, ironically it got sunnier (after a lot more rain). I ate a beef kebab in a place called Røkland. When the rain stopped we took another jolly along a rocky beach.

Some thing on the beach.

In the afternoon we reached the metropolis of Bodø where we filled in some time at the mall until our ferry to Lofoten.

Bodø (From the ferry)

We boarded the ferry around 18:15 and sailed for about four hours in relative comfort until we reached Moskenes at 22:00. The sun was still out although a blanket of clouds was hovering over the chain of islands that we were approaching, in the otherwise clear and slightly purple yet still bright sky. Plenty of other people were outdoors on the ship with me as we closed in on the silhouettes of jagged rocks emerging from the ocean. There was a shared sense of trepidation that we were close to reaching one of the most beautiful and remote places on Earth. A 24 hour flight, followed by 2 weeks of driving, and then an elusive reservation on the long ferry crossing. The ship blasted its horn and it was time to return to the cars in the hull and make land.

The initial stretch of driving from Moskenes to Ramberg, particularly around Reine, was top tier life shit for sure. On the south side of the islands, the northern sun was obscured by the mountains other than where the gaps were between peaks, at which points the light flowed through the cloud cover and cast an absolutely beautiful hue over the rocks, ocean, the houses nestled up the cliffs, the roads and bridges braving their way into nature. I would have stopped to take a thousand photos, but I'd promised Vanessa I'd have her in bed by midnight and as it was her birthday I did not renege on this. So I was forced to live in the moment, to take in every beach, snow capped mountain, vista, shimmer. Sometimes the sun was behind me and the whole scene was an atmospheric haze. Other times I drove directly into it and I had to fish out my sunglasses despite the clock ticking closer to midnight.

We arrived in Eggum just before midnight. Eggum faces east-north-east, under the watch of a large mountain, so there was no direct sunshine when I turned in around 12:45am. Out the window, over the sea, the clouds glowed softly like a sunset had just passed. Beyond the water, another mountain. The name of the WiFi in the Airbnb was "midnightsun" and as I fell asleep I pondered if they change it in September to "northernlights".

I have never been to Disneyland, I don't think I'd like it if I did. But for some reason Disneyland is the word that occurs to me when I visit certain places with certain lighting. Venice. Olympic National Park. Lofoten.

I have no photos from that drive. Only memories. And it was unforgettable.

I can now add Mosjøen and Mo I Rana to the places in Norway where I have been rained on. Despite that, there were plenty of dry moments on the road trip north today.

We started in Brønnøysund and during a good breakfast I realised today was actually a public holiday in Norway for some reason. That reason is Kristi Himmelfartsdag, which translates to "the supermarkets are closed or in some cases open in smaller configurations".

The Brønnøysund Bridge

This is one of the different things Norway does, along with not believing in bath mats and adding bacon to condensed milk. (I tried some Bacon Ost on bread this morning and I was left with only more questions.)

The drive was shorter today so I cruised a lot more and we stopped at various rest stops which often had little walks attached.

A lake with little islands by the road.

A large, long lake ringed by mountains, just after a tunnel. With a nice toilet.

Another way up in the last of the snow with a board walk to a small lake.

Another was next to a fast flowing, glacial river and a track rest area. And a toilet. No pictures.

Where we stopped for lunch - Mosjøen - was along a river facing a wide mountain range where instead of waterfalls running down the face it was still snow packs filling the vertical gaps in the rocks at higher altitudes. Lucky it took me twenty minutes to find a working car charger because after I did it stopped raining long enough to reach the river and assemble some tuna sandwiches with stolen breakfast rolls. It rained on us on the way back to the car.

We reached Mo I Rana, and without many options for dinner, I tried the double chicken burger with chips at Circle K. That was still nearly $30 but it fed both of us so not a bad result. Circle K also has chicken salt in 1 kilogram shakers.

After dinner I tried another walk to the town's only open supermarket, which I did not realise was downhill. It rained on me several more times, but I did see a few neat things on the way back up the hill.

It was still sodden in Trondheim this morning. We couldn't even sit down to eat cereal and yoghurt by the festung to watch the sunrise. The sogginess of the place followed me most of the drive north and east to Holm. Literally, as my shoes and socks were soaked. It rained in Steinkjer where we filled up with more coffee. And it rained as we drove over the bridge into Grong. As I plugged in the charger, the rain started to clear.

Some mist in the trees worth stopping for north-east of Trondheim.

Another day of adventures for the Koppen

We walked down to the river and visited Grong's Coop to buy lunch ingredients. The rain still abated as we enjoyed a delicious lunch of tuna, tomato, lettuce and hummus stuffed into a horn in a foresty rest stop called Hessienget.

The hole in my bread roll was a sign of things to come.

My lunch was so huge that I knew I had to press pause on it in order to catch the ferry from Holm to reach our destination of Brønnøysund. Starting the car and checking the map, it was evident that it was a lot tighter than I'd thought. And unlike other ferries, this one only ran every hour. I'd been extremely time efficient with ferries up until this point - even for the ones where a delay meant waiting ten minutes for the next one. I cursed myself for putting that record in jeopardy, and cursed some more as we hit a convoy of white RVs and motor homes crusing under the speed limit almost instantly after leaving the rest stop.

Well, it took some driving, but both the BZ4X and my also-clearly-late-for-the-ferry companion ahead of me managed to fast forward our way through the Helgelandskysten scenic route. Along the way I caught glimpses of fjords, mountains, trees, rocks, pristine nature under nice, afternoon light diffusing through clouds that weren't actively raining. If today had been day one of the trip I think I would have stopped multiple times for various waterfalls. As it turned out, it was just amazing scenery for the race to the ferry.

After all that, we made it to the ferry terminal with minutes to spare before the ferry arrived to unload and then load. We joined the queue of cars, watched the boat unload, and then anticlimactically watched it finish re-loading and run out of room many cars ahead of our position in line. With a toot of its horn it set off, and all the remaining queue pulled over to the first lane to wait the hour for the next one.

Well, this was a good chance to stretch the legs, finally throw my wet socks in a bin, eat the rest of my sandwich, and watch the ferry cross the waters and then back to us. We made it into the next intake, and then drove the remainder of the way to Brønnøysund which appeared to be this part of Norway's equivalent of Victor Harbor, and the same amount of action as to be expected still a week before summer.

The sun was now out. We checked into the hotel, then left for some $40 beef burgers wearing dry socks. The sun was now brighter than it had been for days, and this was uplifting for me because it was time to drive to Torghatten - the main reason we'd come past this way.

Torghatten is a mountain with a hole through it. And I knew you could climb up it into the hole and that while it was steep to get up, it was only a couple of kilometres round trip. The experience ended up exceeding my expectations. After a lovely drive over another cool bridge, and past a few more robot lawn mowers, we parked in the shade of the mountain and climbed up the steps and into the cavernous hole.

The view from both sides of the hole.

The warm, evening light welcomed us, shinining into the hole from the other side and into my soul. It was an incredible place. Looking west was like staring at some video game map. Views in every direction. Even looking back up at the hole.

After climbing down the other side we turned back and did it again. It was such a good mountain I felt the need to walk up it from two directions.

My mood was much sunnier after that.