Our tent was very cold when we woke up the next morning. We had planned to make breakfast in the campground’s kitchen and then go hiking on a trail we could see from our campsite but decided against it in favor of hot showers and driving in a warm car to the nearest bakeri which we expected to find in one of the small towns the map showed along our route. Our bakeri plan was foiled however because we were driving into a long stretch of mostly uninhabited mountainous woodland and the few towns we saw often didn’t even have a grocery store. Finally by mid-morning we gave up and made ourselves a picnic brunch in a town with a picnic table near a blue-grey lake full of glacial run-off. We got back in the car and continued driving in the wilderness for a few more hours when Paul suddenly made a sharp turn up a small road immediately after exiting a tunnel. After a few dozen yards there was a turn-off to a large restaurant and gift shop. We ordered coffee and sat next to a glassed-in space with the Bøyabreen glacier just pouncing distance from us. I was gratifying impressed with Paul’s glacier finding abilities but he modestly admitted that he knew to turn up that small road because he’d read about it in the guidebook.
After our coffee and baked goods we got as close to the glacier as we could again noting that August is not the month for prime glacier viewing. I had my turn at wanting to go where the guidebook recommended – Mundal, also called Fjærland, is a small town with glacier views and is one of the few towns in Europe to be officially designated a book town. The first thing we noticed as we approached Mundal was that the locals had written all over the round hay bales tightly wrapped in white plastic out in their fields. Some fields had many bales lined up with each bale having one word on it to spell out a slogan or sentiment. More than one field’s hay bale writing was devoted to angry denunciations of a local gas station. There were also fields where the bales devoted themselves to humor. It was either a contest or a local mania. We gathered from the more earnest field-writing that we were in political/philosophical country and it would be good to mind our Goethe and Marx. The next thing we noticed as we pulled into the town itself was that it did not take its designation as a book town lightly. Just about every building that wasn’t a house was a bookstore including many buildings that were once barns or toolsheds. The converted agricultural buildings were the best. They were next to a long lake and were old and crooked with thick stone walls holding a memory of having once been whitewashed. Small windows looked out onto the glacial blue water. The strips of floor between the close-set aisles of books were covered in tattered oriental hall carpets and oval braided rugs often over-lapping each other. The book-shelves went floor to ceiling and contained anything and everything as long as it was musty. Most of the bookstores were unmanned with just a sign saying, “pay at dock”. Paul dove right into the first store he saw and disappeared among the books but I continued walking up a small road that led away from the lake and town into farmland and mountains. As I climber over the first hill past a lovely Victorian hotel I got the best distance views of the Jostedalsbreen glacier of the whole trip. I hurried back to drag Paul from the book stacks to see it too. We looked, walked some more, then returned to the Victorian hotel. The hotel’s exterior was a pale milky yellow four or five stories high with a turret and porch. Bright flowers grew up the porch spindles their color made brighter by the white of the glacier seen in the background. We went in and ordered a bowl of good potato soup in their restaurant. Inside the hotel was lovely and odd like some treasure found in an antiques store. The décor was Victorian to a fault including a painted chimney. The walls were covered in knick-knacks and random old paintings or yellowing maps. Some pictures were hung way too high, some just a few feet from the ground. We considered asking the price to for the night but decided to press on. I was reluctant to leave Mundal as we stood at the parked car looking back. It was my favorite town of the trip and I would love to return to it someday.
When we got into the car we took a look at the map to plot the rest of our trip back to Bergen and discovered that Mundal was quite close to the wonderful red hytte on the hill we had stayed in three nights ago! Before we reached the hytte Paul stopped at a grocery store and got two beers one called Ringers which seems to be very popular in Norway and one from a Norwegian brewery called Aass – our first alcohol since Cochem’s wine. The hytten owner was just as wary and sly as the last time but did consent to let us rent a hytte for the night. We had fun pulling up to the red cabin rental no3, a different number than last time but virtually the same. We had a different, but still super cool, set of china and, if possible, a nicer view. We poured out the beers and sat on the back porch drinking them as we looked out over the long turquoise lake. We had gotten to the hytte fairly early in the evening and I used the extra time and indoor plumbing to hand wash our laundry stringing it up to dry on our backpackers bear-bagging rope. Dinner was lapskaus stew and rye crackers with hot chocolate for dessert. As we drank the hot chocolate yellow lights from the town across the lake began to come on one by one shining out over the darkening water.
