Thankfully, we’re running out of long drives. Pretty soon, a “road trip” might last three hours, meaning we’ll have to waste some time during the day. When the continental breakfast at one hotel ends at 10:00 and check-in at the next is at 3:00… you can only spend so much time lingering over lunch, you know? So we’ll see how things work out, but before that happens, we have to navigate our way through the big maps.
I’m starting to think that we’ve been bringing the clouds with us around Norway because they were still here this morning. If we’re lucky, they’ll stay here. If we’re unlucky… at least the plants won’t be thirsty.
Most nights when we stay in a hotel’s parking lot, we pay a fee at the desk just before we leave. As it turns out, our hotel’s lot doubles as a public lot—people are supposed to prepay for a certain number of hours, then get a ticket stub to make visible in the windshield. The receptionist explained this to us as we were checking out, adding that without the ticket stub, we might have a parking ticket under the windshield wiper waiting for us. When we told her there wasn’t one, she said, “Go, go, go!” And we went, went, went! Free parking for a night! Woot!
We got on the road and started off with a drive through some crooked terrain to get to the ferry—perhaps fortunately, nothing special happened. We’ve been listening to the radio and wondering if Norway has only a few channels that play at different frequencies in different areas of the country. As opposed to just a number, once the radio finds a station, it will show the number briefly, then display “NORSE” or “NRK 1” or whatever the broadcast happens to be. If you’re in the right area, you might be able to pick up NRK 1 at more than one frequency. There’s less variety that way, but it’s easier to find the song you were listening to when mountains start causing a lot of static.
Our timing has been really good for these ferries. I know they’re scheduled to head out every half hour, but we still didn’t have to wait long before our second free-for-all to get on the boat began. We also managed to park on the upper level—they had a ramp that opened up and gave cars access to a second level where they could park during the course of the trip. The ramp went up, a ferry worker came out to direct people in our lane toward that opening and Mom squirted through just before he could get in front of us.
That’s when I started calling us “Norwegian lemmings”: when on the roads (or ferries), just follow the car in front of you, get out of the car when they do, get back in and start the car when they do… we may follow everyone off a cliff, but at least the crash will happen at the bottom instead of on the road where it would be considered our fault.
Back on our Sognefjord in a Nutshell trip, we saw a bunch of buoys that made floating squares off to the side of the boat. They could have been nets for whale fishing, they could have been supporting pipes for oil drilling, they could have been targets for airdropping fish food for starving tadpoles—we really didn’t know. During the ferry ride, we saw another group of squares and Mom asked someone what they were.
It turns out they’re pens for raising salmon. There were some little boats floating in the area which are used to supply the fish with food. Apparently, Norwegians take the easy way out and bring it up close instead of airdropping the food by plane.
We drove through Stavanger, which is supposed to have a lot of interesting museums. Given the length of our trip that day and our lack of interest, we didn’t check out said museums. (There was supposed to be a monument for a certain battle that might have worth checking out, but after a long search on the internet, we found pictures of the monument, but nothing about where exactly it was.)
We were driving along the coast at that point and had considered stopping to take a quick swim in the ocean, but remember what I said about the clouds following us? They were dumping water from the sky at that point and we wouldn’t have had time to get from the car to the shore before getting soaked. We’d have plenty of time to take a swim later on, so that was one more thing we decided to skip.
One thing I found surprising (even though it shouldn’t have been) was that as we drove along the coastline, some farms’ fields extended right up to the water. It’s not like they had anywhere else to put their crops and they needed as much space to plant as they could get. It just looked a little strange, that’s all.
What looked really strange was in some areas along the coast where there were too many rocks to plant anything, so people were raising animals there. There was barely enough room for grass in between the crags, but cows, sheep, goats and horses were apparently maneuverable enough that they could get to those patches of grass without taking a wrong step, breaking their legs, falling against the rocks and smashing themselves into a pulp. Lying down in that terrain looked difficult, but at least one cow found a way to do it.
