Not, however, Nantucket, where serious humidity simply doesn’t happen. Six years of living in the US only increased my bafflement at why it should celebrate its supreme national holiday on a day when 90 per cent of the country is a sauna. Alas, none of the extensive Coffin land interests ended up in my part of the family But I am not one to bear grudges. I still have the softest of spots for Nantucket, not least because there is nowhere better in all America to spend the Fourth of July. My wife is American, and a remote ancestor of hers is one Tristram Coffin, who around 1640 wisely left Massachusetts colony for Nantucket, where he would become the island’s first governor. Let me first of all declare an interest. All of the sensations – sun, sea and snow – all of the day, and all of the night.How to get thereBritish Midland (0345 554554) has, unfortunately, ended its pounds 50 promotion.

Its lowest fare for travel from Heathrow next midsummer (departing 20 June, returning the next day) is pounds 233 return including tax.There are also links from Aberdeen on Air UK (0990 074074) and from Gatwick and Newcastle on Braathens (0800 526938). For a winter trip to Bergen, Color Line (0191 296 1313) sells mini-cruises for pounds 54 return, including three nights of on-board bed and breakfast.Other solar viewpoints at 60 degrees northShetland – Britain’s northernmost islands; you can watch the sun not setting from the desolation of Unst or the comfort of Scalloway; St Petersburg – the “white nights” of June show a shimmeringly beautiful city; Helsinki – not as beautiful as St Petersburg, but with less of a record for murdering foreign visitors; Anchorage – where suburbia slams into wilderness and survives.. Or you could take one of those odd little train rides that you suspect exists only to inject some joy into the Thomas Cook European Timetable.A train that looks as if it has recently retired from suburban service around Oslo is now called upon to perform astonishing feats of locomotion, clawing its way up the side of a wayward valley. From time to time it pauses for breath, allowing breathtaking views of the chasm carved by a glacier.Finally, you reach the high-altitude station of Myrdal, accessible only by train, in good time for a midsummer snowball fight before the express from Oslo to Bergen arrives. Compared with the staggering scenery that precedes the tunnel, it is a bore in both senses. But, suddenly, it releases you at the head of a magnificent fjord, where the water battles with the sheer cliffs for the honour of looking most brooding and foreboding.You could get a boat back from here to Bergen, slicing through coastal scenery that looks crushed by the hand of God. Shorn of its Scandinavian neighbours, it resembles a tadpole whose tail is flicking in the general direction of Russia.

This is not a convenient shape for cartography.I armed myself with the most confusing map ever devised and aimed for the port of Flam, about 50 miles east and the same again north That’s what the map seemed to suggest. But in a region where you are rarely more than a longboat’s length from sheer rock or icy sea or both, the roads veer recklessly as they find the path of least resistance.About 10 miles out of Flam, the roadbuilders finally got fed up with all the twisting and turning and blew a hole straight through the mountains. So content yourself with the vicinity of a city that was showing every sign of being celestial.The citizens, happily, are on the same planet as me when it comes to hitch-hiking But first: find the right road Norway is a peculiar shape. Bergen pops up precisely two-thirds of the way along the protracted journey from the Equator to the North Pole. At 60 degrees north, the city is six degrees south of the Arctic Circle – defined as the line where, on Midsummer’s Day, the sun remains above the horizon right through the “night”. But the cost of traversing each of those extra degrees would be approximately pounds 50.