Especially when the weary is driving. That was pretty much the story of the day: leave Oslo, drive through the mountains halfway across the country (technically, from the middle to the western coast), then arrive in Bergen. No plans beyond that. You might think that would be extremely easy to stay awake for, but you would be wrong. Thankfully, we survived the experience and got to sleep in our beds that night. Yay for beds!
This journal entry is gonna be tough because it’s so hard to convey the scenery we passed through during our trip from Oslo to Bergen. I guess I can start with knowing it was going to be a long drive, so we woke up early, ate a quick breakfast, put our bags in the car and headed west.
Actually, before we left, we were talking to the woman behind the front desk and told her where we were going during our trip. When she heard that we were spending a night in Sweden, she told us that we should visit Stockholm since it’s the best Scandinavian capital. “Stockholm is beautiful, Oslo is ugly.” Well, it was trying its hardest to be ugly when we left.
The sky was icky and gray and we weren’t looking forward to driving for over eight hours in that stuff. Thankfully, it wasn’t long after we left when things cleared up and we could see everything And there was a lot of everything to see. Cliffs that dropped straight down for hundreds of feet, long waterfalls, mountains all around us, we caught a glimpse of a glacier off in the distance… it was amazing.
One thing that was more intriguing than amazing was that on the shoreline of a few lakes and the field where we saw the glacier, there were little piles of rock stacked up in columns scattered all over the place. We’re not sure whether that was to honor the dead, honor the gods or an attempt to flag down the mothership, but they looked interesting nonetheless.
As you would expect from a long road trip, we stopped for gas twice. The first time, we still had plenty left in the tank, but Mom wanted to make sure we could figure out how to do it. As it turned out, the instructions on the pump were in Norwegian and we were clueless, so the woman behind the counter offered to start the pump from inside and we could pay there instead of using a credit card outside.
Upon going inside, however, there was a problem. When the woman tried to use Mom’s Visa card, it didn’t work. She tried again and it still didn’t work, at which point she asked if Mom had another card she could use. That’s when I noticed the woman had a pair of scissors in her hand.
“Uh-oh.”
I wrote a blog entry a couple years ago when someone stole my wallet and bought a few things with my credit card before I cancelled it. First thing? Gas at the pump to make sure the card worked. Second thing? Pizza. (Hey, a thief has to have his priorities straight…) Apparently, this woman wanted to deny us our pizza and was prepared to chop Mom’s card into itty-bitty pieces of plastic.
Thankfully, the manager came over, punched a few keys on the register and it suddenly worked fine. “Oh, she’s just smarter than me.” At that point, I didn’t care who was smarter than whom—I was just glad she put down the scissors.
We stopped for gas again further on down the road and had a little more trouble that time. I was standing around inside while Mom was pumping gas, then she called me to come outside: the pump wasn’t working. I tried squeezing the handle, but nothing happened. We weren’t sure what the problem was, so Mom called over someone who was standing next to the building and asked him how to make the pump work. He tapped on a clear little bubble at the top of the pump, then told us, “It’s out of fuel.”
The attendant inside immediately called her boss when she heard about it, then let us know that a fuel truck was coming to refill the tanks, but it was running late. Since we still had about half a tank left, we opted to buy some snacks to help us stay awake on the road and took off.
Having those snacks was definitely helpful, too. Aside from the monotony of the road, we spent a lot of time underground. We took a mountainous route to Bergen and there were lots and lots of tunnels. When we entered the first tunnel, I had a brief flashback to when I was a kid and would hold my breath or say “Wheeeeeeeeee” during the length of the tunnel. That wasn’t such a good idea in the area where we were driving.
Honestly, we think it’s because Norwegians love building roads in the mountains. Move up and around, swerve in different directions, but if all else fails, drill a big hole straight through. During the course of our day-long drive, I’d say we were inside tunnels for about 20 miles—one of them was almost five miles long by itself. (Try and hold your breath through the entire thing and you suffocate to death.) Then there was one that climbed upwards while it was underground—if you don’t count the brief part of the road that came outside, the tunnel crossed over the top of itself as it turned 450 degrees.
But the roads did more interesting things than just tunneling. Perhaps the most memorable above-ground part was when we were doing switchbacks to get up the side of a mountain: it moved sharply upward and each turn was almost 180 degrees—we moved up a lot more than we moved sideways.
And what would a long drive like that be without getting lost? That’s right, we were supposed to turn off onto an exit that would have taken us directly to our hotel. I misunderstood the directions (it had the city listed on the sign, but not the highway number; that number was on a sign about 10 yards down the exit ramp), we drove past the exit and straight into a 2-mile long tunnel that went under the city. After a few more wrong turns, we looked at the map that will get us out of Bergen, found a highway number to get back into Bergen, then drove on that road in the wrong direction for a couple miles. (The compass in our car suuuuucks.)
Upon turning around, the signs said we were heading to Bergen, we went through the tunnel again and finally got back to the highway we were on initially, backtracked a little further to make sure there would be an entrance ramp after we got off… it was an ugly process, but we found the hotel. And when we got there, we parked on the sidewalk.
I’m not kidding. In Oslo, something might look like a pathway for pedestrians, but that wouldn’t stop cars from driving down it to get to another road. Thus, when we saw the little ramp that went onto a bunch of cobblestones, we pulled right up. (We might have thought better of it if we hadn’t been on the road all day, but as things stood… oops.)
And that was about it. We were pooped and decided to eat at the hotel’s restaurant, went upstairs, talked briefly about our plans for the next few days, then I laid down to grumble myself to sleep after getting us lost again. It wasn’t worth crying over, but the situation definitely called for grumbling. I was sure that things would be better in the morning—might as well go to bed now and make morning come as soon as possible.
