Fjords, Norway.
“I was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”
That’s how Norwegian painter Edvard Munch felt when he was inspired to create his now-infamous work The Scream. And let me tell you Mr Munch, after my first experiences with fjords in Norway – I felt that.
We rolled up on our first fjord (not counting Oslofjord) around sunset — which in the summer doesn’t happen until around 11 pm. It was called Tyrilfjorden. And it was nothing short of magical.
We found a perfect little spot on top of a hill where a grass clearing gave us the most incredible view of the whole fjord, with little shadowy islands sprinkled all across it, and a bridge running across. The pure, raw power of nature and humanity’s attempt to tame it.
But on day two the madness kicked in…
I don’t know if it was the altitude, the excitement, the fatigue or the fact that the sun didn’t set at all that day, but we ended up spending nearly 11 hours in the car driving around like crazy people.
First we tried to get access to this small road on the side of a lake just outside Geilo. But we needed a Norwegian SIM card to send a text to a random number in order to get through an electric barrier.
The strangest payment system I’ve ever seen. And a complete fail, since it was Saturday and we were in the middle of nowhere.
So we kept driving. We made it up to the top of a plateau that might as well have been on the moon. There was an unbelievable amount of nothing as far as the eye could sea – stretching for miles and miles around us.
But we didn’t find any suitable places to stop, and before we knew it it was 8 pm and we were back on earth. So we kept driving.
In a parking lot near a waterfall we saw another Globe Camper! We stopped to talk to the owners Nellie and Santiago for a bit. They were driving all the way to the top of Norway.
But because we didn’t want to sleep in a parking lot and we wanted to find THE ULTIMATE SPOT to spend the night, we kept driving.
We found a spot on a tiny gravel road near a bridge and a waterfall that was absolutely beautiful, but super noisy. We decided not to stay there, but Morade wanted to do a drone shot of the car driving on it.
Which, of course, meant that I had to drive it. On a narrow gravel road, that went up a hill, under a stone tunnel, and across a stone bridge, with a 50 foot drop on the side of it. All on a stick shift truck with our home on top of it.
No big deal. Nobigdeal. No. Big. Deal.
It was no big deal, until I was behind the wheel and I started hyperventilating and shaking with anxiety because I was scared the car would stall and I would roll down the hill to my death.
The first time I didn’t even manage to move a single inch because (I realized later) I had never shifted out of neutral.
But I insisted to try again, because I didn’t want to fail. I needed a win. And goddamn it, I made it up that hill. It took me 30 minutes, and I crawled up in first gear, but I made it. And of course I burst into tears as soon as I got to the top.
It ended up being for nothing, because the drone freaked out about the altitude and refused to record, but that doesn’t matter.
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Anyway, after all this, we realized we had pushed ourselves too hard. It was coming up on 11 pm and we still hadn’t settled for the night or had dinner. We decided – fuck it, we’re stopping at the first spot we find.
And reader, it ended up working out. Which is a terrible lesson. We found a beautiful place to park on an old road with a fjord on one side and a waterfall on the other. And we made fajitas for dinner and had a wonderful night.
But the moral of this story remains: chill the fuck out, you’re on vacation. And like one of the guys who made our camper told us at the very beginning: Sometimes what you’ve got is already good enough.
Later, Anca and Morade