Fjord Focus

Now this was fun!

One of hundreds of falls

Got up this morning and had another great breakfast.  We intended to sleep until 6 AM, but at 5 we started watching the clock.  Eventually, we just got up early.  We brought the bags down and the guy picked them up to go to the hotel in Oslo.  I hope that wasn’t a scam!

We headed off to the train depot.  “Yust keep walkin’ as straight as you ken down da street,” the desk attendant said.  “Ya kent miss it.”  Come to think of it, his English was a lot better than my Norveejin accent.  And last night we had this charming waitress who sounded American, but not quite.  She had spent 9 months in New Hampshire as an exchange student, which explains the “not quite,” I suppose.

We didn’t miss it either, but if there is one thing I have learned from Garrison Keillor, it’s that when they say, “You can’t miss it, you probably will.”  We walkd fifty feet into and through the station to the ticket office to verify our tickets.    The ticket office was camouflaged by orange construction mesh, but Birdie and Jill found it anyway.  I had no clue.

In the Train

It’s a little spooky doing things is a place where you don’t speak the language, especially when you can fake the accent.  There is a reason we can mimic the language.  The Norwegian language on the radio definitely has the same lilt.  Accent or not, the words mean nothing to me.  Mostly the Norwegians that interface with the furreners speak Engish.

We got on the train, the car that had the conductor.  Eventually she came by.  She stamped our tickets and said, “Getting off at Voss?”  “No, Myrdahl,” we all assured her.  “Not Voss?”  “No, Myrdahl,” another stop beyond Voss.  Of course, after we got off at Myrdahl, we realized we were supposed to get off at Voss.  Now we would be reversing our trip, counter-clockwise around the circle instead of clockwise.  This translates into having missed the train to Oslo.  We took the train to Flom where the boat would be going back to Grundvangen, where we would hopefully catch the bus back to Voss, closing the circle.

 

So we wandered around Flom for a bit and had a light expensive lunch, a bowl of soup, three small slices of pretty good bread and a beer for $25 (each).  The dollar is weak in Norway!

The boat was fun.  It was open air seating for the best view of the longest fjord in Norway.  Gorgeous gorges with tall walls of what I would suppose is granite.  Like the Boundary Waters in the extreme.  Essentially the walls are mountains with rivulets running to waterfalls ever fifty feet and towering drops of hundreds of feet.  Spectacular!  The trip was two hours.  The last 15 minutes or so we spent inside, having gotten cold in the wind and misty rain.

Nope, not this one!

This one!

I was a little anxious getting on the bus, .e. wondering if we would get on the bus, but we made the cut.  There was a group of 14 ahead of us that waited for the next bus, since there were only 13 seats.  Coming down the gorge was spectacular with water falls and switch-backs.  We will see what’s in store getting to Oslo next.  We’ll be late, so leave the lights on for us.

But we made it to the train and on to Oslo.  It is near midnight and we are all tired!