A 4:30 alarm woke us out of dreams into the early morning dark of the camping hytte. We got dressed quickly and silently while it rained outside. The night before Kaitlin had taken the time to carefully repack her belongings – her partially full backpack would continue on with us in the back of the Romeo until we took possession of the Bergen apartment, while the rest of her stuff would go with her on her month long student exchange in France. She had dragged an extra duffel bag with her in her backpack for this repacking event and we were relieved when she had been able to finally announce that yes, everything she wanted to take to France would fit into the duffle and her carry on. Now those two bags were picked up from their place by the door, we took one quick look around, then locked the hytte and drove out of the muddy campground along the same road we had gotten lost on the evening before. Round-a-bout and round-a-bout and round-a-bout we went until we abruptly came to the airport. We parked in the parking garage, grabbed the luggage and went into the airport letting Kaitlin do all of the checking in by herself. Then, suddenly, (and how did we get here so soon?) we were at security and she needed to go on by herself while we stayed behind wondering. Dad had hugged her a bit longer than usual and I tapped her on the nose and said “Be good.” She said she would try then walked off down the line to the metal detector her ponytail swinging while Paul and I just stood there.
We started to walk back out of the airport to the car but then stopped and thought maybe we should grab a cup of coffee first instead. The world had just tilted and we needed to regain composure.
When we were ready to go on we drove the car back past all the round-a-bouts to the campground where we parked in the mud and had a 6:30 breakfast in the hytte. Paul heated up water for tea and I pulled out a map and the travel guide to discuss where we were planning to get to by nightfall. We had two choices for how to skirt the Hardangerfjord – E16 which the guidebook described as full of noxious tunnels or Hwy 7 which was said to be “rattling”. We went with rattling. We were making for Ulvik where we planned to camp for the night before continuing on to the main attraction of the Hardangervidda plateau.
Breakfast over we packed up and made the hytte tidy before dropping the key in the campground drop box and getting onto Hwy 7 around 8:00. Unfortunately 8:00 in the morning on a weekday is a sort of rural rush hour with a wide assortment of semi-trucks and lorries and buses and construction vehicles and other what-not pushing the speed limit to get into Bergen as fast as they can. It would seem like this wouldn’t bother us since we were going away from Bergen and had almost no one on our side of the road. The trouble was that the road didn’t exactly have sides. It didn’t exactly not have sides either – I mean oncoming traffic did stay to their right and we stayed to ours – its just that there wasn’t all that much left to stay to the right of. The “two lane road” was only a few feet wider than a typical rural one lane road in the US and there was no center line. On one side was a rock wall and on the other a drop off into a fjord. This was pretty much the state of driving for the whole trip but that day, being our first, we didn’t know this and blamed the guidebook. Rattling? What a disingenuously tame word.
The tension of driving Norway’s smaller roads led to an unfortunate imbalance in travel enjoyment between Paul and I. To save money and paperwork kafuffle we only signed Paul up to drive the rental car and only his license was valid in Norway. This meant that while I was half leaning out the window saying, “Oh wow! Did you see that? It was sooooo pretty!” Paul was gritting his teeth and muttering, “This is NOT a two lane road.”
We made several stops along Hwy 7 including an interesting graveyard beside a white wooden church. Many of the gravestones had the words “Takk for Alt” written on them. This translates to: Thanks for everything”. I assume this means “thanks for everything life that I have lived.” Paul thinks it means, “thank you person who died for everything you did for others in your life.” In either case it was a gentle sentiment to read on stone over stone as the mist swirled around. Another stop was in Utne where the landscape got just too pretty for me to be able to stand how much Paul was necessarily missing and so we stopped for some coffee and Norwegian waffles (spelled vaffles) in a little café with a second story view. Our view was of part of the town, farmland, and the fjord. It was very beautiful plus there was a table of crusty old Norwegian men gossiping behind us. We also stopped at a lonely rest stop to use the bathroom but left because some very scary men were either conducting a drug transaction or practicing to be Vikings.
Takk for Alt
Many gravestones have these birds on them.
Ulvik was lovely. Apparently it was the first place in Norway to grow potatoes. Other than that it’s rather low on the tourist attraction scale but it was, as usual, very very pretty. We got a campsite at the town’s campground, set up the tent, and then I went walking on a farm road halfway up the steep hillside. They grew apples there in orchards that reminded me of where I grew up in Adams County only add in a finger of a fjord and really long thin waterfalls. Dinner was another can of Lapskaus stew heated up on a hot plate in the campground’s makeshift kitchen. Lapskaus stew, brown bread and Snofrisk. Back at the tent we stayed up late into the night talking about parenthood.
They are not lacking for moss in Norway.
