Off for a relaxing trip out of Bergen. All we had to do was maneuver through the tourists and tour buses and we could make our grand escape. Well, we made it a little less grand by backtracking and taking the highway instead of driving through the city streets (and potentially getting turned in circles again), but we escaped nonetheless.
And wouldn’t you know it? The weather was gray and drizzly again. Mother Nature has not been our friend through the majority of the trip. Part of our time in Oslo was bright and shiny—I particularly enjoyed the park with the girls sunning themselves in bikinis—but for the most part, the skies have been overcast.
Thankfully, we spent most of the drive on highways, so the weather didn’t affect the roads a whole lot. We just got on the road and drove south until we arrived at the ferry from Halhjem to Sandvikvåg. There were two boats and they went back and forth, departing from Halhjem every 30 minutes. We got in Line 3 just as they were getting ready to load the ferry, which you would suspect would mean we would have to wait for at least half an hour, but you’d be wrong.
As Lines 1 and 2 began to shorten with people driving onto the ferry, the cars in front of us started scooting forward. Hey, if they were gonna move, we were gonna move with them. We followed the car in front of us and got onto the boat just as one of the dock workers was walking past us and holding his arms out to stop more cars from coming onto the ferry. We may not have been the last ones on the boat, but we were close. And we were on the boat, which was really the most important part.
Everyone was getting out of their cars and heading to the upper deck, so Mom and I used an elevator to get up there and check out the scenery. There were chairs and benches on the outer deck so people could sit down and enjoy the fresh fjord air, but remember what I said about the weather? We decided to poke our heads outside to take a look around, then quickly scurried back inside with rain-dampened heads.
It wasn’t long before people headed back downstairs to get in their cars, so we jumped back in the elevator, drove out of the ferry and into the middle of a whole bunch of cars heading in one of two directions. At least we could console ourselves with the knowledge that the slow traffic wouldn’t be our fault this time.
Yeah, we were kinda surprised at how fast people drive here in Norway. After hearing about how severe the punishments for speeding can be, watching people race by us when we’re already driving over the speed limit… I can’t count the number of times Mom pulled off to the side of the road to let cars get past.
Which is not to say that punishments aren’t severe. We were talking to a waiter earlier who told us a story about his nephew. Apparently, the kid had his license for a month or so and got nailed by a traffic camera driving 75 km/h in a 50 zone. That’s pretty far over the speed limit, which might explain why the judge sentenced him to 30 days in jail, slapped him with a 2000 kroner fine and suspended his license for six months. Let that be a lesson to you, kids: Always make sure you’ve left the country before that notice from the traffic court arrives in the mail.
Once again, we stopped for gas twice today, but not because we were burning up the fuel. This time, the first station required you to pay at the pump and since Mom’s credit card doesn’t have that chip in it, we couldn’t use it. At least she found a kind stranger to help her figure out how to use the pump, even though his effort was in vain.
We didn’t have the same problem at the second station. Was it because there was a kinder soul behind the counter who took pity on us poor Americans who couldn’t use the pumps with our non-microchipped Visa card? Well, the cashier might have been, but the real reason was because all of the card readers were broken, so everyone had to pay inside. Ha!
