Oslo to Undredal

Friday, September 2  

Rolling our suitcases to the car felt especially good this morning; we'd been wondering about the logistics of having them delivered to us at today's destination, which is barely a dot on the map.

Speaking of geographic dots, I want to mention something that I forgot to include in yesterday's post.  While we were on the walking tour in Oslo yesterday morning,  a man in the group noticed that Tom was wearing a "Piseco Lake -  Adirondack Mountains" shirt and asked him about it.  He is from Binghamton, NY and has camped at Piseco -- our own special dot on the map!  This world keeps getting smaller...

Now, on to today's travels.

We spent the whole day driving from Oslo, which is in the eastern part of the country, to the western fjords, passing through varied country and MANY tunnels.  The deep green forested areas in the east gave way to mountainous, rocky terrain where the growth ranged from olive green to a camouflage-like patchwork of a variety greens, and now we're back in dark green forested mountains.

The roads were two-lane, in very good condition, and lightly traveled. In this mountainous country, tunnels cut the distances and eliminate the climbs and, like the mountains, they follow one upon the next with great frequency.  In addition, some are very long; we passed through several that were more than two miles long today.  Often, the scenery and/or the weather differed at each end of the passage, so we passed from sun into clouds, into gray mist with distant patches of snow.  Everywhere, snow melt created waterfalls that coursed down the mountains; we stopped for a short hike to get up close and personal with one of them.

Our route was dotted with very small towns, some with the wooden churches characteristic of Norway;  once out of Oslo, we didn't pass anything you could call a city.  We did, however, encounter lots of sheep that were not at all intimidated by passing cars.  They grazed right along the shoulder, ambled across the road, and even lay down right in the road in their version of a game of chicken.  They won.

Our base for three nights is the little town of Undredal, which is situated about 3 miles down a one lane road on the shore of Aurlandsfjord.  Across the fjord, the mountains plunge right into the water and we can see a little farm perched above the fjord on one of the mountains.  Our cottage is named Damskipskaien, which means steamship dock; it's one door from the dock where a small ferry stops when you signal for it by turning on a blinking light on the dock!

It's that small a town!