Sandnes

Hi hi (as they say here). It's pushing 19:00 here and I'm sitting in a hotel lobby with a view down a small grassy hill, over a two-lane road, a small harbor and a fjord, Gandsfjorden to be precise. There's a small bay on this end and on the other side is granite rock cliffside, with a train tunnel carved through, a hill of trees and several dozen small houses. Down the fjord further I see rock hillsides covered in trees.

We drove up here early this morning from Kristiansand on the southern tip of Norway to Stavenger, where we hopped on a boat for a tour up a postcard fjord, Lysefjorden, with 600 meter tall granite cliffs above the boat and 400 meters of glacial blue water below it. Stunning.
Now we're about to gather in the room for some six-handed rounds of the word game Boggle. We're not playing it in Norwegian -- yet.

We made two fairly long days of driving on this roadtrip this morning and yesterday, although we didn't leave Ågårdstrand until afternoon on Saturday, spending the morning at a national park with Viking burial mounds. Connor and I went down at 4:30 a.m. local time to watch the sunrise and see if we could confirm the local legend of elves dancing and playing on Fiddler's Mound... and we can't confirm (or deny) it. We came back with the whole family later in the morning to look at the mounds again and walk in the cool of the forest alongside the fjord.

(A passenger train is now streaming along the track here, and now entering the tunnel.... )

The day before we spent much of it in Tønsberg, where I typed very briefly from a public library. The basement room of the library featured the excavated foundation walls from an 11th century church, as well as stone outlines where they found two small Viking ships when the went to build the library. We also climbed the castle hill in Tønsberg and ate "porriage" -- romme (sour cream) and butter.

Reade, Connor and I also spent a couple hours each of those days swimming in Oslo fjord and jumping off jumping decks into the salt water.

Norway's been having something of a heatwave while we've been here, with nothing but sunshine and highs around 30 everywhere except today, which was a bit rainy and still cloudy, which makes since as just down this fjord is the North Sea.

OK -- so much to say. One the boat tour today the captain pulled us right up to a water fall and the tour guide put out a bucket and filled it with water, then he passed out cups and we all drank a cup of pure water. They also pulled up to a little grassy cliffside and Reade and the tour guide jumped off the boat to feed three goats. Then they jumped back on. And Reade counted some 200 jellyfish in about 10 minutes on the ride back across Stavanger harbor.

The road this morning was amazing, high twisty mountain roads with water and lakes and rivers at every turn, and at the bottom of each valley a steep-walled fjord.

OK -- that's enough for now; we'll be at this hotel for three nights and it appears this computer will be available for some updates depending on our schedule.

Again, it's nearly 7:23 p.m. local time, 10:23 this morning back in Colorado. Bye!