Sunday, June 21, 2015
Norway is AH-mazing! We were up unnecessarily early again
this morning at the Fretheim Hotel in Flam. But, that turned out to be a good
thing because it gave us a chance to walk to places we hadn’t seen yesterday
and to have the different sharp angle of the morning sun. We also got to see
the Marco Polo cruise ship sail in and dock in Flam. After sailing part way out
on the ferry this morning, that had to be amazing! They arrived in Flam about
9am so I don’t know how long they had been sailing up the fjord, but when they
got to Flam it looked like they were standing 2-3 deep at the rails. We had a
good buffet breakfast and for the first time I will find fault with our
detailed instructions. We should have been advised that after breakfast and
traveling all morning, we would arrive at Stalheim Hotel at noon in the middle
of absolutely nowhere and they only serve breakfast and lunch! We should have
been advised of this so we could buy and/or pack something, or the Stalheim
could be prepared to feed us. We did a lot of walking today on our snacks that
we’ve been carrying and buying here and there for just in case and this was
one. It was a long time from breakfast at 7am and dinner at 6:30pm. If that is
the only misstep in this 17 day itinerary, I guess we’ll count ourselves lucky.
Of course Kensington Tours and Try Norway turn us loose when we leave the
mainland of Norway for Svalbard, so some of that 17 days will be on us!
Norwegian breakfast buffet. Clay liked the fish pudding and
the pickled herring. I liked the barley porridge and the Norwegian pancakes
(similar to Swedish but a bit thicker). We both tried the local brown cheese
and liked it but we need to figure out why it is brown. We were first in line
for the 9am ferry to Gudvangen by being early. Not that it mattered, it wasn’t
very full and we didn’t find a good place to be forward and outside to take
photos. We sat outside on the back near the port side and could walk back and
forth easily when they told us to look at something. There must have been 100
or more awesome waterfalls. There were several little villages. We stopped at
one, Aurland. It has a shoe factory. We did not stop at Undredal but it has a
stave church and it is where they make the brown cheese. We arrived in
Gudvangen right on time at 11:25am. It was a bit of a free for all to get the
bus to Stalheim Hotel. Our instructions said to walk up the pier to the
awaiting bus and let the driver know we’re going to the Stalheim Hotel, but
there were a dozen buses there. The only one with a sign said it was going to
Bergen and there was no driver to be found, but it was swarmed with about 50
people shoving their luggage under it. I walked on down and tried to find
another bus and driver. Every man I spoke to told me that the bus to Bergen was
the bus to Stalheim and the only bus to Stalheim. That was not actually true,
but we got some of the last inches of luggage storage (which was a good thing
since our luggage had to come off first!) and a couple of the last half dozen
seats. It turned out when we got off at Stalheim Hotel that the first driver I
had spoken to in Gudvangen was driving an almost empty bus behind us as he
arrived at the hotel as we were pulling our luggage up. Good thing because
there were at least 8-10 people standing outside the hotel at 11:55am when we
arrived and they all rushed the door when the driver opened it to let us 2 off.
He told them he could only take 2 and the youngest jumped up the stairs with
her ticket. He had to back her off as he had to go open the luggage hold for
us. The others asked him when the next bus would be by to pick them up and we
never heard him reply. But he never replied to us either! The good news is that
there was a 2nd bus right behind and it let off a couple and had
maybe 6 people left onboard and only had to pick up the less than a dozen who
got left by our bus. At least now, we have some idea what to expect tomorrow
when we leave here!
Last night’s Fretheim and tonight’s Stalheim are Historic
Hotels of Europe. They are both pretty amazing. Tonight’s room is huge! We have
the most spectacular view! We should have checked our itinerary more carefully
so we would have realized about lunch here and the fact the hotel is all by
itself between 2 huge waterfalls. There is nothing else around. All there is to
do is hike! It turned out that the easiest hike we might have done was wiped
out over the winter by an avalanche and has not been repaired. We walked part
of the Old King’s Road a 13-hairpin turn steep road with views of both
waterfalls. It isn’t a long road as the crow flies, but they said it would take
about 4 hours to walk down and back. Now we understand! It was steep! We only
walked 5 or 6 of the hairpins before deciding that we had seen enough and going
back up. We’d have never survived the whole walk down and up. We found the
memorial marker for Per Sivle, a famous Norwegian poet who lived near here and
was born in Flam. Since the weather was still nice I decided that we should
walk the hotel’s historic Folk Museum. It is only open to guided tours, but I
guess not today. I asked if we could still walk through the park of old
buildings and they said yes. We just couldn’t go in but we could look in the
windows. We did and have no idea what we were looking at. We found the marker
for Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit in the 1890’s. It finally clouded over and we were feeling
beat so we came inside. According to the locals, we have been having
exceptional weather. They claim that May was very cold and wet and summer has
only just arrived. Lucky!
The other things that we should have realized when planning
this but it just wasn’t on our radar was the summer solstice. It is on June 21,
so today. The longest day of the year. Now, we did realize that going as
far North as we’re going at this time of year that we’d have long days but we
had not thought about what it meant to be here for the longest. All Norway, and the rest of the Baltic countries, are losing it over this event and they are celebrating it this weekend. The last day of school was Friday and all Norway
is on their way to summer homes and vacations, etc. Everywhere we have been in
the Baltics has talked about the effects of living with the long days of summer
but especially the short days of winter. They talk about winter suicides and
summer vacations. I don’t understand why they just don’t take their month of
vacation in January or February to somewhere warm and sunny and enjoy the long
warm days of summer at home, problem solved. Canada cannot be the only place
with snowbirds, can it?
We don’t have Internet in the room here, so I will post this
without discussing dinner. I may have to come back and edit it later. Clay will
have to add photos later too.
