Thursday, June 17, 2010

Day 8 - Go from Geiranger to Grong

Today's blog starts at 2:30am. I kept waking up during the night, and since there seemed to be light continuously, I decided to take a photo when I woke up at 2:30. (It was also theonly time that the cloud lifted enough to see the valley below us).  The photo doesn't do justice to the amount that I could see in the middle of the night.  And we were still a long way short of the Arctic Circle.



Today was the drive into Hell and out the other side.  Figuratively and literally.  Figuratively because the drive itself was 9.75 hours according to TomTom (without petrol or food breaks), the weather was horrible for much of the way, and the traffic was starting to resemble Germany again.    Literally, because there's a village in Norway called Hell ... and we drove through it today!!!!



An early challenge were the sheep .... rabbits in the headlights is how sheep respond to a piece of bright yellow plastic on their road ... but they weren't quite as aggressive as those sheep in Scotland many years ago.



The next challenge was the start of a snow shower as we crossed one of the high plains.   Fortunately, it was only the section before we entered the tunnel.  The other side was snowy but not snowing.




Apart from that, there were no human interest stories today ... just driving, driving and more driving. 

In the evening, we had a quite pleasant, albeit expensivse, meal at the Grong Gard og Gjestgard (Grong Farm and Guesthouse). On the menu were salmon (naturally) and a traditional Norwegian Stew that bore an uncanny resemblance to a traditional Irish Stew. The main function of this guest house is to serve as a base for salmon fishermen. The walls were decorated with pictures of blokes (with unpronounceable names) who had just caught a 15kg, 20kg or 25 kg salmon.




However, tomorrow there's another 8-9 hours of driving to Bodø (pronounced Boo-deh), but we are scheduled to cross over the Arctic Circle just a little before the finish.... Yippeeeee!



Day 8 of Alps to Arctic


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