Feelings: Quiet, Comfortable.
Our first destination the following morning was Hunderfossen. Hunderfossen was the site of the Winter Olympics bobsled run and is still operational. Though there appears to be snow in them there hills in the distance (or is it stacks of white plastic-covered hay bales) the bobsled is run on wheel bobs rather than ice at this time of the year. With a top speed of a hundred kilometres per hour, a time of seventy seconds, a cost of about fifty dollars and an indemnity form a foot long, the dice wasn’t required for a ‘no’ verdict and the push on for coffee became the top priority.
Back on the other side of the freeway was the township of Hafjell. It seems like this is where they put everyone up for the games—it is hotel after hotel after camping after hotel. On our first Sunday in the country we were finding that the one hundred and sixty days on average that Norwegians work (allegedly) definitely don’t include Sundays. Nothing was open. We found a one-man operation pizza place open. They had coffee (yay) but no milk (mmm?) and we had the most enormous one-to-two person pizza I have ever seen in my life.
The Peer Gynt Veien was next on the destination program. It is a road that follows along some of the locations spoken of in Ibsen’s poetic play Peer Gynt—since purchased on the kindle for ninety-nine cents and semi-read.
Aside: The Kindle. I am still minorly ambivalent about the Kindle and the place of the kindle in the world of books. It has been handy to be able to read seven books on the go (2001: A Space Odyssey (finished now), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (ongoing from the physical book pile at home), 52 Pickup (ongoing from the Kindle pile pre-holiday), The Girl Who Played with Fire (Swedish), Don’t Look Back (Norwegian), Brotherhood One: Dark Lover (holiday reading which I haven’t started yet, and, which is about vampires which seems apt in Scandinavia in which we have already been in Spiken (ie. Spike from Buffy) and Sunndal (ie. a weak link to Sunnydale, California, where Buffy lives), and, of course, Peer Gynt. It has been handy to have all those books and a guidebook without the weight. It has not been handy to have a guide book without an index—you have to try and guess what chapter your desired destination will be in, if it is there at all. It has also not been handy to have a phrase book that can’t be easily flicked through. It means that people switch to English a.s.a.p to avoid waiting for me to try to find a word or a sentence with thirteen elongated clicks. What’s the final vote? I’ll just do a quick poll. For: 2, Against: 0. But the margin is narrow.
Back to Peer’s road. This would be our first experience with the stressful and frequented one-lane roads we will find ourselves on often in the next few days. The Nords, used I am sure to these tiny by-ways, fly by on the cusp of the mountainside at terrifying speed while we shut our eyes, hold onto wheel or door frame and hope like hell that when we open our eyes again we will still be on the road and in one piece. Makes for a peaceful afternoon drive. We had run into a couple of tolls on the large roads which ranged between twelve and sixteen krone, but were not expecting to pay seventy to get through a gate onto this road. It was too late to go back once we hit the gate—cars were backing up behind us. Possibly the money is going towards actually building the road. The usual trend with Norway is that unless the road is wholly funded by the government (such as the world’s longest tunnel which they put their hands in their pockets to pay for and so is not tolled) then it is tolled until it is paid for. This was kilometres of gravel and corrugation and pot holes and mud. But it was high above everything and the views were stunning, and for summer in Scandinavia we were treated to snow. Coming back down we saw some more of the damage of the seemingly more than normal amount of water that is around. The ‘bomveg’ (I’m translating this road work associated warning as ‘looks like someone bombed this road’) was quite bad and large bits of the side of the road had floated off down the river.
We stopped for coffee at the end of the road with bunches of people all doing Sunday type things like going to dog shows and getting sun-burned. And then stopped in a fairly timely manner at a camping ground with cute huts (am doubting that we’ll pitch a tent again) just outside of Otta. Lime ciders, local soft cheese and chicken rolls and scrabble filled the rest of the day. When we arrived it was sun-shiny and lovely; while we moved stuff car to hut it started to bucket down and again the sound of rain justified the toss of the coin that had fallen (happily) on hut over tent. At midnight I did my final teeth clean. It was the first time I had really been up that late. The sky was dawn-like but definitely light. No torches or lights were needed to see your way from hut to bathroom. The midnight sun doesn’t give you a tan at this latitude but it’s definitely out there. Cool.
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