Day 100: Wild strawberries and fjords
I’ve had the second* best road-trip of my life and it was all without any planning on my end. There couldn’t have been a more perfect location and combination of travelers! The Norwegian fjords, my spontaneously bizarre, philosophical, and funny cousin, his patient, thoughtful, brilliant-planner wife, my long-time friend from L.A. with her contagious laughter, and my mom. Between the 5 of us, we spoke 8 different languages on the ride and by the end were starting a conversation in one language and ending it in two and still understanding each other. We traveled 1,500 km in 5 days by car and ferry through some of the most breathtaking and humbling landscapes that I’ve ever seen. We saw hundreds of waterfalls (I’m not exaggerating), drove under, over, and around mountains, walked on cliffs, and took our car on ferries across fjords.
View norway roadtrip in a larger map
We visited 3 fjords – Hardangerfjord, Sognefjorden, and Geirangerfjorden – and took in some touristy as well as off-the-beaten-track sights like the old houses in Bergen, the Fossheim Stone Center, and the Troll’s Trail (Trollstigen). Every evening, we stayed in cabins, conveniently located along all the main roads, with complete bathing and toilet facilities. Most of them even came with a full kitchen and dinette set so we just needed to bring our own bedsheets, towels, and groceries. When split amongst us, the cabin costs were also very reasonable (<$50/person). The cost of groceries in Norway is another story though. [slickr-flickr tag="norge_roadtrip" sort="date"] That was just a sampling. View the rest of the pictures on Flickr, here.
Notice the scattered towns and cottages all throughout the countryside? It’s amazing how many cottages there are in all this nature. Some farms were located on sheer cliffs and only accessible by boat. I’ve been told that young children are sometimes tethered to keep them from literally falling off the property into the water. Norwegian cottages are often simple and eco-friendly, blending in well with their surroundings with their grass roofs and wooden walls. We also passed many old stavekirkes (churches built from wooden staves), some from the 13th century.
I was amazed by the resilience of the backpackers, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and mosquitos who roamed the cold, wet, and foggy highlands and the treacherous mountain switchbacks. Well, the damn mosquitos didn’t confine themselves to those areas.
“What about the wild strawberries you talked about in your post title,” you may ask. Regretfully, I ate no wild strawberries during the trip but I did eat handfuls of freshly-picked farm strawberries bought right at the edge of the fields. However, I did have the best strawberries I’ve ever eaten in Norway and they were the wild ones I picked in the forests. They’re also the smallest strawberries I’ve seen, about the size of a marble at best. It goes to show that things can come out best if you let nature do its thing and stop trying to make things bigger and better. The best things come in small doses.
(*) The best road-trip is still when I decided I didn’t want to go to school anymore and I got into my car with a good friend and started driving. I eventually hit the U.S.-Canada border and didn’t have my passport so we turned back.
Recent Comments