Kathleen
Voss, Norway – July 19-21, 2013 We rented a car from Bergen and headed to Voss. The drive was absolutely stunning. We rented a little apartment at a ski slope in a beautiful valley close to Voss and were able to tour the fjordlands from there. This certainly is a land of stunning natural beauty and in addtion one never ceases to wonder at the Norweigan diligence in building tunnels to get them around their very mountainous, watery country. I looked up how many miles of tunnels there are on Norweigen roads and came up with XXX kilometers, the longest of which is about 8 miles long and we drove through it a couple of times, once coming from our fjord tour & Flam and once heading out to Oslo. Impressive, wide tunnels. We often remarked that it was shocking how these tunnels had much more road area than many of Ireland’s secondary roads. It is not that I love travelling in tunnels, it is just that you have to really admire what tremendous feats they all must have been to undertake. The weather turned in our favor when we left Bergen and we had a couple of delightful hikes as well as the quintessencial Naeroyfjorden and Songesfjorden boat cruise, in the words of Rick Steves, “If you travel to Norway and don’t take the time to visit the fjords, you should have your passports taken away from you”. This entire country is, not at all surprisigly, beautiful in a gigantic and stunning way. I think it is difficult to capture the enormity of things in photographs, but you will still be able to tell that it is lovely. Other than beautiful hikes and scenery, we continued to lie low and mostly cook our own meals while in Voss due mostly to the very high cost of dining out in Norway. One afternoon, while we were in the hotel that was next to the apartment we rented, checking our email as we didn’t have wifi service of our own, the bartender offered us a drink. I asked him out of curiosity how much it would be for a bottle of the house rose. He indicated that this one bottle would cost us 3800 NOK, or about $600 US. We opted out. Our apartmend did have a lovely little patio, however, with beautiful views of the surrounding mountains, so we amused ourselves in the evenings sitting out and enjoying the view. We are still pretty far North at this point and not too far away from the Solstace so that it would still be broad daylight at 11 PM when you were thinking about going to sleep, which was pretty bizarre. By this point, we are not quite certain that it has actually been fully dark anywhere we have been since we arrived in Ireland over a month prior. It is nice to have the extra daylight, but still a bit strange that it is light when you are going to bed….ah well, ever southward……