Today we left the swankiest hotel to date on an island called Jeloy. Swanky but a little pretentious. We were originally going to cross over to the main part of Norway on the ferry to Horten, but decided that to save some Kroners, and I actually enjoy driving here. The plan was to drive north up the channel, fjord, bay, whatever it is called and cross over near Drobak on the bridge there. So we went north with light traffic and crossed at Drobak only to find the tunnel we were going to go through was closed (fire?). Last night we asked the lady at the ferry if the ferry was busy and she said yes because of the tunnel closing, which never registered that this was the tunnel she was talking about. So we asked a driver ed teacher having a break with his young female student (probably calming her or himself down), how to get across. His advice was to go north to Oslo and cross there. So Oslo was in the tea leaves all along, even though we were avoiding it (another city). So off to Oslo which was pretty busy, traffic wise, and then headed east into the Norwegian outback (aka boonies).
The first thing we noticed this morning was how many tunnels there are in Norway. We may have gone through 1 or 2 in Sweden but I don't remember. But Norway pops a tunnel through any place a hill or mountain gets in the way. They are anywhere from 300 meters to 15 miles long (Deb says longest in the world) which we may go through in the next few days. They must have gotten good at it. They also must be willing to pay a little (or lot) more to do tunnels instead of roads that go around and/or over. These tunnels are nice and smooth (and free) and well kept and well lit inside.
So Oslo looked like a port city with half industrial port and half cruise liner docks. We have seen a ton of cruise liners here and once you see them out on the fjords at sunset, you can understand why they like to come here to Norway. We have run into a few folks off the cruise ships and they seem to drop folks off for the afternoon with strict orders that the boat leaves at some exact time. No idea what happens if you miss the ship. I assume you pay for transportation to the next landing spot.
The other thing we had a hard time with is getting cash from the ATM machines. We tried a few before finding one that would take ours. Our daily limit is not that high so we have to be careful because of how expensive everything is here. The other issue is that our credit card does not get taken everywhere because it does not have a chip in it and the machines here do not read the strip correctly or at all sometimes, so you end up paying cash (or making a mad dash for the car before they can call the police).
We headed up into central Norway and very quickly after heading out of Oslo, encountered the wilderness. We were trying to figure out where else this country felt like and couldn't. It feels like we are travelling in Alaska (never been there but this is what we imagined) except the small remote villages there have been around for hundreds of years. There are some valleys with crops growing and small farms, but the forest is very alpine-like. We climbed and climbed up the valleys on a road that followed an old railroad bed and stopped at one of the stave churches which Norway is famous for. They used to have a thousand stave churches up until the time of the great plague (1349) that wiped out half their population. After that the number dropped and many of the churches fell down or were burned. Now there are 28 left in the whole country, and we passed 3 or 4 today. Stave refers to the wooden staves they were constructed with (basically 4 or more trees stood on end to make a really tall church). We went in one and saw the beautiful altar painted a couple hundred years ago. One of those objects that someone spends hundreds (more?) of hours on over many years and you just see how out of place beautiful it is when you see it contrasted with these rustic surroundings. Then a kid came in and said they charge 35 kroner a head to look inside the church, so we left and poked around the graveyard ($7 bucks to look inside a church seems pretty un-Christian to me). The graves covered a time period from very recent (2000's) back to the 1700's. We later found out that here they re-use grave sites after 150 years or so. If it is like home, stones did were not written on much before the 1700's and if they did it was on limestone which did not hold up. Anyway, nice church.
If my brother is reading this, this is where we should go someday to ride motorcycles. Beautiful twisty roads with roaring rivers and mountain passes. We hit the "chains required" signs as we climbed and soon were going up 7-9% grade roads over the first of what looked to be a few very high passes. We climbed above treeline to the top of the first pass and looked back at a spectacular view of the valley with its river/lake shining in the afternoon sun. From the top of the first pass we could see a broad plateau to the next pass with scrub trees and grass. There are also some seasonal cabins where people must come up to ski in the winter. We were told later that these are camps and not year-round (unless you were crazy enough to live up here year round). We were also told that they keep this road open all winter (yikes). We descended to the center of the alpine plateau and found our hotel in the tiny town of Dagali. It is only open part of the year, is very alpine town feeling and has several large gathering rooms with lots of places to sit and look out over the mountains. We went for a hike down to the raging river (they just had a solid month of rain), up a cross-country ski trail into town (wide spot with a corner store that might be in business, hard to tell), and then hiked back up the road to the church, then back to our hotel. There were only a few other people staying there, and a tour bus full of older Norwegians (bork, bork) that did not speak English as far as anyone could tell. We met a wonderful older couple from Sweden who were staying here for the week, and we befriended a couple from Holland who we exchanged questions and answers with the rest of the night (dinner was served at the hotel because there was no other place to go within many many km). They had travelled a lot and it was fun talking to them, very nice folks.
Believe it or not they do have WiFi but I am too cheap to pay 20kr ($4) for an hour!! Off to bed..
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