The Norway we all like

It took me a long time to convince myself not to turn back and cover the 20 km we did by car the previous day - but I played with the idea long enough. Some more elk greeted me in the morning, this time an entire family, but they were a lot shier than their relatives in Sweden. The road went close to Lake Femund, overlooking two national parks. An amazingly scenic area, lakes, barren mountains with patches of snow (during high-summer!), the mountains at times had bizarre shapes, formed by ice and wind.

At the restaurant of a hotel by the lake I decided to have some breakfast - only the find out that 'the food truck had not arrived' and they had barely enough for the hotel guests - so remote was this place. Oh well, I did not die of starvation.

Then came this first weird-looking house...what does it have on its roof? Grass is growing there. I though it must be really old and neglected - till I saw one more and one more...well, it turns out this is a tradition in Norway, this is a good site to see how it looks like : http://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/09/grass-roofs-of-norway.html.

Yes, great day it was, amazing nature, met some mountain goats crossing my path, I had not realized that the road led rather high. Then it was a nice long drop into the city of Roeros, which belongs to the UNESCO heritage site. It must be the church, I though, which was quite interesting, but definitely not worthy of such a differentiation. The main street was full of wooden cottages - also not bad, but have been there, done that...

Then came this villain of an idea. According to the plan, I had to be in Stockholm by next Tuesday - so it was high time to think about getting back to Sweden. Rupert, my friend who himself was on his way to Norway by car from Austria, recommended (=tempted) me to take the ferry from Trondheim to Bergen. Trondheim was about 150 km away, so reachable within a day's journey, so I could take the Saturday sailing from there, reaching there by bike on Friday, the following day. Nice plan. At the local hotel, they were kind enough to let me use a PC. The only glitch was that there was no sailing on Saturday, neither Sunday, but there was the next day, on Friday.

I had definitely not planned for such an abrupt ending of the biking portion - but this sounded all too good to miss. Why not take the train from Roeros to Trondheim this evening and be on the ship the next morning? Yeah, why not?

So I bought the ticket to the train, still 2 hours out, to Trondheim. This gave me enough time to take a second good look at Roeros and then I understood the reason for the UNESCO protection: the smaller streets of the town are full of the small grass-roof houses and there are wooden bridges over a roaring river, which look like they were from the 15th century or so.

Another highlight is the local theater. You see, this town used to be a mining town and they have two large heaps of residuals. Today these serve as look-out hills, where one can freely wonder about. Now at the foot of these hills they have a theater, which, when I was there, played a piece about Norwegian heroes who fought back against the wicked Swedes.

The train came in with about 35 minutes of delay and was surprised to see just two cars - it is rather an expensive way of transport in Norway and most people take their cars. I don't remember exactly, buy my trip cost like Eur 80 to Trondheim - which is about three times the price I would deem 'fair', but then...it is what it is.

I arrived pretty late in an otherwise very lively Trondheim, where Morten Harket, the lead singer of Aha, just finished giving a concert. Especially impressive in the city is its cathedral, when I showed someone a photo image, he thought it was the Notre Dame.

My hotel was a rather crappy Best Western, I named it Worst Northern, but at least it did not cost more than the wooden hut without the toilette...