Open your history books, please!

We did get to a major road eventually, but by that time, it was a couple hours past noon and we were starting to get hungry. (Funny how the boondocks don’t have a lot of roadside restaurants…) We eventually found an exit that led to a café, so we got inside and found a small buffet behind the counter. Unfortunately, everything was written in Norwegian, so we had no idea what they were serving.

That was most important because Mom doesn’t eat pork and for all we knew, even the lettuce was made of pork. However, they did tell us they serve hamburgers, which seems to have become somewhat of a staple of our diet. If all else fails, order a hamburger.

Mom pulled out her credit card just before the cook threw the burgers on the grill and they made her stop. The café didn’t accept credit cards. The manager apologized to us in broken English (in a non-Norwegian accent), then asked where we were from. Mom explained that we were from the States, then pulled out enough cash to pay for the burgers, at which point… He. Kissed. Her. Hand.

I’m not kidding. I was dumbfounded. He told us he was from Kosovo, but why that would inspire a smooch on the back of her hand when she was able to pay with cash, I haven’t the slightest idea. Then he said he’d cover something for us—I think he said we were getting fries for free, I’m not sure. Regardless, when the waiter brought out our plates, those hamburgers were huge. With lots of fries. I have to say that being on this trip with Mom, she’s made things a lot more interesting.

The hotel was fairly easy to find today, which was hasn’t always been the case, but this was a very upscale hotel. You wouldn’t necessarily think so because of the people checking in (not including ourselves). There were a few bald, yet hairy gentlemen with mustaches wearing muscle shirts, but the one who concerned me the most was standing on the front steps after we got back from a walk.

He was a pudgy little man wearing a blue knit cowboy vest wide open with nothing underneath so you could see all of his chest and stomach hair, camouflage pants and two fanny packs turned around to the front. I couldn’t help thinking that he might be a good addition to the Village People.

Anyway! When we first got to the hotel, they weren’t ready for us. It wasn’t that early in the afternoon, given our looooong side trek, but since it was Sunday, they hadn’t cleaned a lot of the rooms. Thus, we parked the car in front of the building and went for a short walk.

We headed down toward the harbor and saw a fountain in the middle of a roundabout. The statue in the middle was three people in a boat on top of a whale’s tail with the third standing in the back holding up a giant whaling spear. We discovered later that the statue slowly rotates over time, given that the side we approached on the way back wasn’t the side we walked away from.

We also got a preview of the giant ferry that would be taking us across international waters to Sweden. And it was giant. As it approached the dock, the front opened up and an arm extended to latch onto the dock, providing a little cushion to help slow the boat as well as prepare a ramp for the cars to drive down. It should be an interesting ride.

One reason why Mom chose this hotel was because she saw a picture of the swimming pool and thought it looked like an elegant place to take a swim. I took a nap that afternoon and thought that it closed at 6:00, so I missed my opportunity. As it turned out, the pool closes at 4:00 on Sundays, so by the time they let us check in, taking a dip was no longer an option.

Well, technically, that’s not entirely true. The pool opened up again at 7:00am on Monday, but our alarm was set for 7:30 so we could have breakfast and get to the ferry—waking up that early is hard enough, but even earlier just for the sake of a swimming pool? No way.

When it was time to head up to our room, we found out just how convoluted this luxurious hotel actually was. Building the garage required some development plus they added a new wing to the building, so getting to our room was a mess. We took one elevator from the garage to the first floor, walked down a hallway to get to another elevator that brought us up to the second “floor”, then had to climb up a short flight of stairs before getting to the rooms in the 300s. Thankfully, someone from the reception desk helped bring our luggage to our room because it was a pretty long trek.

We decided we didn’t want to get back into the car to hunt for someplace to eat, so we went down to the hotel restaurant for a quick bite to eat. When looking at the menu, nothing looked spectacular—maybe we were just weren’t that hungry at the moment—but we decided to get a couple bowls of fish soup. (I thought we were getting the entrée-sized bowls, but that’s not what the bill said.)

We’ve been taking pictures of some of our meals when they look very extravagant or have just been out of the ordinary: for example, the whalesteak and Norwegian trout from Bergen were both captured on film. Our soup was no exception, given that amongst the rest of the seafood, there was a giant red crayfish perched on top. I initially put it to the side—I had no idea how to get to the meat of a crayfish—but just before the waiter took the bowls away, I pulled the meat from the tail and ate it. Not great, but at least I can add that to the strange foods I’ve eaten here.

I guess our first waiter had a little trouble with English, because we soon had another one who spoke immaculate English. I knew something was up as soon as we started talking about our trip to Bergen and he compared it to Seattle, saying that Bergen has about 340 days of “precipitation” every year. Seriously, do you know anyone besides weather forecasters who uses that word?

Maybe it’s just popular in Nova Scotia. He grew up there, but eventually married a Norwegian woman and moved overseas. That in itself doesn’t seem like that big a deal until you factor in his new parents-in-law who spoke no English at all. It was apparently an interesting few months when he first arrived.

So we had a good dinner, had fun chatting with the waiter and are now about to have fun sleeping because we have to get up early for the ferry to Stromstad. It leaves at 10:00, but our reservation says we should show up 90 minutes before it takes off. One of the receptionists once made reservations to take the ferry a month beforehand, but she got there after the designated arrival time and ended up on a waitlist because they already sold her ticket to someone else.

We’d like to avoid a similar catastrophe, so early is better than late. Speaking of which, early to bed and early to rise makes one less sleepy than late to bed and early to rise, so I’m done for the night. (I want to be well-rested when I get to Sweden, the other land of my ancestors. Three cheers for genetic links to dead people overseas!)