Day 10 of our visit to Norway. Before starting on today’s blog, a quick squizz at the view from our room, taken yesterday evening. Not bad hey!
Back to today. We had been anticipating this day all the trip. The travel agent’s itinerary suggested that we do the Besseggen Ridge walk today. It’s an iconic hike for Norwegians taking 8 hours with no rest stops. One thing that has become clear to us is that Norwegians are in fact super-human. And it’s even clearer that we are not! So a Norwegian’s 8 hour hike would equate to a 12-14 hour slug for us! After reading a few blogs, we decided that we were going to admit defeat before even starting. So we replaced our walk with an “easy” walk to Skaget.
To get there we needed to drive up into an alpine region in Valdres. Some views on the way there.
After days in the fjords, it was amazing to suddenly find ourselves in open country with huge horizons all around us. It reminded us of Australia in a way. Absolutely awe-inspiring, We felt we could breathe with all that space around us.
And the goats on the road only reinforced the Australian connection that we felt.
Skaget soon came into view. The theory was that we would climb to the top of this ridge. Ha!
This was it – we were determined to finish a hike for the first time on this trip. It was going to take 4-5 hours and we were going to stick it this time!
Well things started well but about half way up the weather started to look ominous.
Before long the rain set in, and we donned our cheapie plastic ponchos! Bravely we continued on until the wind started to whip up and the temperature started to drop. We looked at each other, started laughing hysterically and turned around and headed back down! We’re not that dumb!
Of course we lost ourselves on the way back down. How can two seemingly intelligent people so quickly forget which way they came on a perfectly well-marked path! Oh well, we had walked for about two hours and at least we got some exercise! Plus we spotted this little fella on the way down – the sort of mushroom that you see in fairytales!
We got back in the car and decided to head down to the closest town, Fagernes, where we had a nice lunch and then visited the Valdres FolkMuseum. Saw some very old log houses and finally had their construction and use explained. The buildings were mostly from the 1700 and 1800’s.
This was an old classroom.
A typical log cabin interior.
A local store.
It was time to head back, but on the way N was determined to see a couple more stave churches, so we made a few quick stops on the way. They weren’t quite as impressive as the churches we had seem earlier on the trip. The first was Lomen Stave Church.
The second was Hegge Stave Church.
That’s it! End of our day and pretty much the end of our trip. Tomorrow we head to Oslo and hand back our car. But very tired tonight! Must have been that hike……….
