Spring in Norway - April 2018
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
In April of 2018, Felicia, Susie, Larry and I flew out to spend 2 weeks seeing Norway and Iceland. We took IcelandAir to Norway and they let you get off the plane in Iceland for up to one week when you are going to or coming back from Europe. We left Kendra at home and I missed her.
We traveled by plane, train, tour boat, bus, more trains, cruise ship and automobile. I think we got to see and do a lot in the short time that we had. We spent 10 days in Norway and 3 days in Iceland and I can cross Iceland off of my country list now.
Photos on this page are from Norway. Not much time to make this page so I will put just a few pictures – still under construction
Click on any photo to see a larger view
We bought tickets to take the “Norway in a Nutshell” trip from Oslo west to Bergen on the coast. We bought them on-line before we left and had to pick them up at the Oslo Central Train Station the night we arrived in Oslo. We left the Central Train Station on the Bergen Railway about 8 am, for an all day trip to Bergen. First leg was a 4-hour trip climbing up higher into the mountains and deep snow to the Myrdal Train Station in the middle of nowhere. We bravely got off of the train at a small train station, into 4-foot-deep snow and hoped someone would come to pick us up before we froze to death.
After 15 minutes, the Flam Railway train picked us up in Myrdal and we went from high in the mountains down to sea level to a village called Flam. The Flam Railway is famous for its steep, winding track that ends at the end of a beautiful fjord. This short trip is the steepest train trip in Europe, going through 18 tunnels and making many switchbacks. Flam is at the end of a narrow fjord and is very beautiful. It was warmer and there was less snow near the water.
At Flam we got on a tour boat that cruised for several hours and went the length of the Aurlandsfjord and the Naeroyfjord (Narrow Fjord) and we got out at the village of Gudvangen. These two fjords are the narrowest and steepest fjords that branch off of the Songefjord, which is the longest fjord in Norway. The walls of the fjords are about 6,000 feet tall and we took a lot of good photos. You can see that we bundled up and were wearing rain jackets to keep the wind off. You have to be tough to get the good photos and videos!
At Gudvangen, we got on a bus, which took us up a winding road back up into the mountains where we got on another train (#3) at Voss to finally take us to Bergen on the west coast. We got at Bergen at 7 pm, after a long trip from Oslo, but we got to see a lot of very beautiful scenery, mountains, glaciers, fjords, waterfalls and finally the coast.
We got off train #3 in the Bergen Train Station at 7 PM. Seems sort of late, but hey, it does not get dark until after 10 PM, so we got to our hotel and went out sightseeing. Here some photos of the Bryggen section (the wharf) of Bergen, with some famous old houses that are in a lot of Norway tourism pictures. You would not believe it, but our hotel was in the last old house on the strip there. It was actually a new hotel built behind the 400 year old wooden building, but we were in the best spot in Bergen for food, sightseeing, eating and drinking. They have a very large outdoor fish market with giant crab, lobsters and fish of all kinds, including dried cod hanging down from the rafters. Anytime you are hungry, just pull off some dried cod and boil it. It seems like Norwegian jerky.
If you are ever in a hurry to see Norway or don’t want to go through the big city of Oslo, you can fly right into Bergen from many places.
Twenty years ago when I was working in Norway, I saw Hurtigruten ships come into small coastal towns every day and I have wanted to ride up with them up the coast of Norway ever since. Hurtigruten is a 125 year old ship line that hauls people, food, equipment and cars to 34 coastal towns from the south of Norway to the North, at the Russian border. Many of these towns do not have road access and this is how they get in and out, get supplies and ship out fish and produce. It takes seven days for a ship to go the length of Norway, there is a ship leaving Bergen every day heading north and a ship leaving Kirkenes every day heading south. We were on the Polarlys, which has about 200 cabins. It is much smaller ship than most cruise ships but can go into narrow fjords and into small harbors.
We spent 2 nights on the Polarlys, got off in a few towns to do some quick sightseeing and then got off early in the morning in Trondheim, about a third of the way up the Norwegian coast. Pictures below are on the ship, the coast and small coastal towns.
We got off the Hurtigruten ship at Trondheim and walked for a while to get to our hotel. Because we arrived early on a Sunday morning, we had to take a taxi to the Trondheim airport, located near Hell, Norway. We got a rental car for the rest of our trip in Norway. After we left Hell, we decided to drive across the border to Sweden and had a great lunch at a ski resort at Storlien, Sweden. No time to ski, maybe on our next trip. We spent time seeing Trondheim but also driving along the Atlantic Ocean Road from one small town to another, going over bridges and through tunnels to go from island to island and taking ferry boats across fjords starting at Kristiansund on the coast. We then headed east back to Oslo, going to Lillehammer and spending the night there at the site of the 1994 Winter Olympics. These pictures are of Hell, old Trondheim and some of the many bridges and ferry boats we were on. We went to some of the different sports sites from the Olympics including the ski jump hill by our hotel.
On our last day in Norway, we made a fast 2 hour drive to Oslo Gardermoen Airport, dropped off our car and caught a plane to Reykjavik, Iceland. See next page for some Iceland photos.