OK ... now that the photo information is out of the way ... lets get to the actual trip. Overall Norway was a lot of fun. I definitely enjoyed this trip more than our visit to France last year, and probably a bit more than our visit to Ireland a few years back. The cities in Norway were not all that exciting ... but we did not really go to Norway to see the cities ... so no big deal.
Anyway ... we arrived on Sunday in Oslo and spent the day trying to stay awake :P. We managed to make it to about 5:00 before we could not take it anymore and had to go to bed. Right away we discovered how annoying it is to sleep in Norway in the summer. The sun is as bright as the middle of day time until probably midnight -- and our first hotel room had crappy window shades -- so we had a tough time sleeping ... even with the jetlag.
Monday morning we got up and walked to the rental Avis car rental place downtown and picked up our stick-shift car. I decided to learn to drive stick for this trip rather than pay the extra $500 a week for an automatic. We hopped in the car and drove up north to the Elveseter Hotel near Lom in Jotenheim National Park. We were originally planning on swinging by Lillehammer on the way, but decided to keep it simple and just drive the 5 or 6 hours straight to the hotel. The drive was nice ... we took a few good pictures ... see one below with some sheep and mountains in the background.
Tuesday we got up and found some good nearby hikes in the Spiterstulen area. This was a cool hanging valley up in the mountains. This was a nice area with a cool little hotel situated at the end of a crappy little dirt mountain road. We did two nice hikes and saw our first glacier of the trip. There were some okay photos, but nothing I will put up here because the weather was a bit cloudy.
After the hike we did a drive through a mountain pass called Sognefjellet. Here we saw a lot of summer cross country skiers and some other nice views. See all the photos here, and one select photo below.
Wednesday we did a great hike -- one of the best hikes I have ever been on -- called the "Besseggen". This is the most popular hike in Norway, with ~30,000 people doing it over the 3 months that the trail is passable. This trail was a favorite of Henrik Ibsen and is described in his play Peer Gynt. You start out by taking a ferry about half way down a long skinny river, and then proceed to climb up a ridge along side that river and make your way back to the car. As you climb up, many of the snow-capped peaks in Jotenheim become visible to the West, and there are great reflections in the green mountain lakes (they are green from the glacial silt). You can see all the photos from the hike here, and here are a couple photos from about 1/3rd of the way through the hike.
While heading up the trail, we came to some patches of snow here and there, but not too much. Below is a picture of an ice lake that we walked next too that I thought was rather nice.
After this point, the hike started to get a bit scary (since I am afraid of heights). There are some pretty serious drop offs on one side for most of the hikes, but then you have to scramble up a ridge for a while with some pretty serious drop offs on either side. In order to climb up the ridge, you have to get pretty close to the edge at certain points (since you are really climbing up the rocks at this point rather than "hiking").
Here is a photo from about half way up. Here you can see the ice lake from the previous picture as well as the larger lake below that we road the ferry down. This is pretty cool, as the right lake is ~1200 feet higher up than the left lake, and also does not have the green color.
This was a great hike. It ended up taking us 6 hours.
The next day we drove to Alesund and stopped by the Gierangerfjord along the way. This is probably the most famous of the fjords in Norway. Sadly, the sky was a bit cloudy, so the pictures did not turn out all that great -- but it was definitely cool. We took a boat tour down through the entire fjord, which seems to have never-ending waterfalls cascading into the water on either side.
Friday we spent the day wandering around Alesund and the surrounding area. Alesund was a decent little city -- but not all that exciting. We tried to make a trip out to a nearby island out in the ocean that at this time of the year is home to ~500,000 birds including 200,000 puffins ... but sadly the trip was cancelled because the ocean was too wild and we would have all gotten sea sick. Here are a couple of photos form Alesund.
Saturday we had a long drive down to Balestrand in the Sognefjord area. Along the way we drove through the west side of the Jostedalsbreen National Park (see photos here), and stopped at the Briksdalsbreen glacier, one of the more accessible glaciers in the country. Here is a picture of part of the glacier:
Here is a picture along the road to the glacier:
We finally arrived in Balestrand on the North side of the gigantic Sognefjord. This was a quiet little town that we really enjoyed. We stayed at a small hotel run by a family whose mother was from Norway and father was from the US. They now spend the summers in Norway running the hotel and the winters in the US. You can see all our photos from Balestrand here.
Sunday we took some hikes in the mountains above Balestrand. We climbed up above the tree line about 2200 feet above the fjord, and then headed back down and continued along the hike. Here is a photo from along the way.
Monday was a dreary day and we went on a day long boat tour of the Sognefjord. I won't share any photos here since they did not turn out all that great with the clouds. I will take this chance to get on my soap box. While on the tour, we were passing down the narrowest fjord in the world, but rather than look at the great natural beauty many of the people on our tour decided it would be better to spend their time feeding the seagulls. Now I hate it when people feed wild animals, and I hate it even more when I have to worry about tons of these nasty birds pooping on me while I am trying to enjoy myself. You don't go to Norway to play with stupid seagulls. I will also point out that they were from a country that is surrounded by water and I am sure that have plenty of access to seagulls from home.
Tuesday we drove (and took multiple ferries) from Balestrand to Geilo (about half-way back to Oslo). This day was pretty uneventful, although we did drive through the longest road tunnel in the world -- the 15 mile long Lerdalstunnelen. Below is a picture that Janel took while we were driving of one of the lit-up sections of the tunnel which were added to help provide a break for drivers.
We were planning on doing some hiking in Geilo, which is apparently up in some nice mountains between Bergen and Oslo. The weather was absolutely terrible though, so we ended up relaxing in our hotel room.
Wednesday we completed the drive to Oslo, visited the Edward Munch museum in Oslo, and returned the car. Along the way back to Oslo our GPS decided to take us down a short-cut through some "Unnammed Roads". I am pretty convinced that it would have ben faster if we could have actually made it. After driving maybe 10 or 15 miles down these crappy backroads, we ran into some troubles. There had been a lot of rains and parts of the road were started to get washed out and we had to turn around before we got into trouble. Moral of the story -- don't always listen to the GPS :) ... especially when it tells you to take Unnammed Roads. Also along this drive we saw some pretty serious flooding. Below is a picture of a river passing under a bridge and causing some serious rapids.
After getting back to Oslo and dropping off our bags, we swung by the Edward Munch museum and saw "Scream" among many other of Munch's works.
Wednesday we spent the day in Oslo. In the morning we visited a bunch of little museums. We saw old Viking ships and got to walk around the Fram, a ship which was used in arctic and antarctic exploration. That afternoon we visited some city parks and a sculpture garden.
Friday we headed on home :).
Some interesting observations and learnings about Norway. Just about everyone there speaks English -- so it is a great place to go if you don't want to deal with foreign languages. Norway is not part of the EU. They spent years fighting for their freedom from Sweden, and finally got it about 100 years ago. They are also a very rich country, having found a large amount of oil in the 70s. Therefore, they decided to stay independent when the EU was formed. If you have been to Europe before, you probably noticed how they have wireless credit-card machines that they bring to your table at restaurants. Nothing special here in Norway -- but I did learn that these machines are actually cell phones and that is how they work. It is interesting that the US does not use these machines. I was afraid that I would be stuck eating a lot of nasty fish like herring ... but I did not eat any. The food was generally quite good, and we had a decent balance of fish and non-fish. Finally, they also have what I call "ready-set-go" lights like Israel but unlike other countries in Europe that I have visited. When you come to a stop-light (which is rare with all the round abouts), when they transition from red to green, they go through an intermediate state where both the red and yellow lights are on at the same time. This is like the "ready-set" stage where you shift into first and get an immediate start. This would be kinda cool in the US ... but probably not as big a deal since very few people here drive stick.
