Welcome to Norway!

Welcome to Norway!

Land of the midnight sun, fjords, waterfalls, trolls, (cinnamon) rolls...and rain!

Hi there friends and family, and welcome to the first edition of our blog! Here you can follow along on our (mis)adventures this summer as we do our best imitation of the millennial crowd and try out the remote work thing while bouncing around Europe.

For even more photos, visit Susan's instagram

Dear reader, as backdrop to the various stories that are likely to unfold over time here I am pretty sure it is going to be important for you to understand that one of us is a master planner who probably should have worked for NASA during the "failure is not an option" period; while the other of us exhibits a lack of attention (some would say appreciation) to detail such that failure always has a welcome seat at the table. Since if you are reading this you probably know us, I'm guessing you can figure out who is who!

Thus it was on day zero of our adventure while sitting in Logan airport waiting for our flight that we learned to our surprise that it rains 267 days year on average in Bergen, Norway - which happened to be our first destination. (As you might surmise, Susan had outsourced most of the trip planning to me, given her crazy-busy work schedule and her lead role in getting our condo ready for renters).

My reason for choosing Bergen, Norway? In a word, mountains. Bergen is surrounded by seven mountains, and is a beautiful little city situated on the west coast of Norways, featuring a lot of history and a picturesque old port area.

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But that rain? Well, we are looking on the bright side: as we see it, summer in (west) Norway is a great time to do some fall hiking! While we read that the rest of the planet is experiencing skyrocketing temperatures this summer, we are already using all 3 of our hiking layers and wishing we brought warmer clothes.

Rain or not, we are having a great time and studying weather reports each day to plan our excursions to optimize sunny days, or more often brief slivers of sunny moments. In future posts, we'll show you a bit more of Bergen and our apartment, but to start with here are some pictures from our first weekend.

Hiking in Bergen: Ulriken to Floyen (Sat July 16)

On Saturday we hiked Ulriken (should I say "in the rain", or is that redundant?), which is the highest mountain in Bergen. Here is a picture from the top of Ulriken looking down on Bergen (no, we did not take the cable car!).

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Once we made it to the top of Ulriken we did a 16km hike through beautiful meadows and ponds, traversing over to Floyen, another mountain in the city.

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The trail was well-marked but we had lots of friends that probably would have helped lead us along!

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Up here in the mountains of Norway, they seem to have lots of emergency shelters like this one. We both remarked how favorably they compare to the lean-to we stayed in Crete, on what Susan likes to refer to as our "death march honeymoon" :).

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Eventually we made it over to Floyen, where we had a beautiful view down over Bergen.

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From there we walked down, and after a nice hot shower walked to the iconic Unicorn Fish Restaurant or Enhjorningen Restaurant (you can see why we stick with the English name!) in Bergen, in a building that dates back to the days of the Hanseatic League. Notice we were given the table of honor below the unicorn.

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Sognefjorden trip: Bergen to Flam (Sun July 17)

On Sunday we took advantage of a rare sunny day to take a boat out of Bergen to see the fjords, and then a train through the mountains back to Bergen. The combination of soaring mountains with sheer cliffs rising straight out of the deep-blue fjords was truly beautiful.

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Train from Flam back to Bergen

The boat tour ended up in Flam, which is a cute little town at the base of the mountains.

They have a great train museum there that gives the history of building 20 tunnels (18 by hand!!!) through the mountains in the early 1900s to build a very steep (one of the steepest standard gauge lines in the world) and scenic train track from Flam up to the mountain town of Myrdal. The vintage train and the 20km trip was beautiful and it was fun to hang out of the windows in the open air compartments.

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Along the way, the train makes a brief 3-minute stop at the side of a huge waterfall, and as added entertainment a woman appears and puts on a brief dance routine that is meant to channel a local spirit named "Huldra" who legend has it is a forest spirit that lures men into the wilderness through the haunting sound of her voice. (Strangely, all male passengers on the train were accounted for after the performance was over).

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All in all it was a great weekend! We experienced some beautiful sights, and got our hiking legs under us. Next weekend we are planning to do the Dronningstein hike, which is a hike along a mountain ridge over the fjords down south of Bergen. Stay tuned for more pictures!