Reflecting on the Holiday

So we come to the last blog post of the holiday. I wonder what image best sums up an amazing three weeks away. 

I think it is the awe of seeing the West Wall of Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim.

Even now the details of the various images on the West Wall surprise and thrill me.

Highlights

 

As I look back there are a few things which stand out, but in mentioning them I realise there are loads that I could include which space would not allow. 

After the impressiveness of Trondheim, the one that comes first to mind is arriving in Olden and seeing Drew in his 'home' element

with the rushing water at the centre of the valley

and getting that sense that in this town everything is very Drewish, even down to the sparkling water.

Then there was walking on the top of the Opera House in Oslo, which even know seems like a crazy idea, but was great fun.

Also Drew meeting a friendly troll (and a whole woodland of them) in Bergen.

In terms of achieving a long term aim, crossing into the Artic Circle for the first time in our lives has to be at the top of them.

Seeing a Church rolling from one place to another in Kiruna is also a memory you couldn't plan for, but thoroughly enjoyed at the time. It still seems unbelievable that you can load a church onto a trailer and move it, ever so slowly for two miles.

Finally, the pleasure of feeling we were coming 'home' as we arrived at the Thon Partner Hotel Kungsborn hotel right next to Central Station in Stockholm.

To Note

It was also impressive to note Drew's courage in overcoming his fear of heights (or as says: of drops) in the funicular in Bergan, in the cable car in Loen, 

on the bridge and the cable car in Tromsø 

Unexpected delights

There were also the unexpected delights which brought brightness to the whole holiday. One that comes to mind is the two ferry journeys that the bus took between Bergen and Olden - who knew a standard service bus would use a small ferry boat to cross the Fjords and what a delight each of those little unexpected journeys would be for us.

The delight of seeing a Cruise Ship leaving Olden as we arrived. It turns out, I found out later, that a former student of mine, Stephanie Richards, who studied with Linda (one of our regular blog commenters) on the Moodle in Schools project, taught by Professor Norah Jones, Catherine Naamani and I, was on that ship; with them being forced to make an unplanned stop in Olden due to the Storm Floris which was battering the UK and Norway at the time. That was a relief for Drew too, as he now knows why this, unscheduled ship was in the Fjord on that day. 

The comfort of the trains both the Oslo to Bergen and the Trondheim to Bodø ones was another real pleasure of the trip.

A special mention also has to go to Thon Hotels, who in no small part made the holiday, by providing great quality accommodation, in excellent locations with brilliant breakfasts. The hotels became a key part of our successful enjoyment of the trip and getting to sit next to the founder (at least of his statue) was also great fun.

Though the window in Room 502 of the Radisson Blu in Tromsø has to win the prize of the best view from an hotel in the holiday, by day

or by twilight

though the balcony of the Olden Fjord Hotel gave it a good run for its money. 

Memorable Meal

While all four of the Michelin starred restaurants were excellent, for me it is Fagn, in Trondheim, that stands out as the most memorable as the Head Chef took the effort to engage with us and explain what had inspired him in his cooking, that with the quality of the whole service, makes it the great foody find of the holiday for me.

That being said only one of the meals we had disappointed, the lack of heat in the Vietnamese meal at Lille Saigon was a disappointment, 

but one out of twenty two is a remarkable record. [Co-pilot's note: I must, dear readers, give an honourable mention to the delights of Bastard Burger - I know some people don't like burgers on principle, but it was a damn good tasty bit of dinner.]

Travel 

In the 22 days of the holiday we travelled a total of 2,500 miles (excluding flights). It was 1,354 miles by train, 867 miles by coach/bus, 188 miles by ferry and 20 miles on the underground.

In addition we walked 144 miles, an average of 5.75 miles a day which is equivalent to 12,450 steps per day, well above the somewhat random target of 10k a day.  Our longest walk day was 13 miles or 28,000 steps on the Sunday in Oslo. Our shortest walk day was .83 of a mile i.e. 1,800 steps, this was the day we travelled from Olden to Trondheim and, after two long bus rides, walked one block to the amazing meal at Fagn. 

Thankfully, our walking helped balance with our food consumption. I left Wales at 12 stone 10 lbs (80.74 kg) and returned at 13 stone 6 lbs (85.28 kg) - I reckon it would have been a lot more than that without the walking. 

Issues

We had a remarkably easy holiday in terms of what went wrong. Most years there have been somethings which have not worked - this year was so much easier than some of the past ones. Everything seemed to work as well, indeed better, than we might have expected in advance. 

The only challenges: 

(a) the inability to get photos off the camara 

(b) the absence of a functioning launderette in Trondheim.

were both annoyances rather than major problems and were solved in one day in Trondheim. Though I suspect I'd have finished the blog a day or two earlier if I hadn't had that big catch-up with photos, it didn't spoil any aspect of the holiday.

Overall it has been fabulous.

Thanks

Thanks to all of you who have made this journey with us, with comments on the blog, on Flickr and on Facebook/BlueSky - they have been a great help and encouragement both for informing the journey and for correcting my mistyping/misspelling. I suspect there are many more spelling errors to catch, so if you see any please let me know.

So, until next year, when we seem to be heading towards Portugal following Richard Sharpe in Wellington's Peninsular Campaign, farewell and see you soon. 

From Olden to Trondheim - A taxi and two coaches

Today is a travel day and one where we are using a taxi and two double decker coaches.

This time we have booked the front of the upstairs, what was always regarded as the best seats when I was a lad.

More about that later, first the morning routine.

Waking up

I wake-up at 4.25am and check my Hargreaves-Lansdown portfolio, a weekly check and an update to Drew is part of our routine at home or away. That done I bring the holiday spreadsheet up to date with the spending for the last few days. 

Next, I make the advance payment for the hotel in Trondheim, as mentioned before in the blog I'd paid for the first night a month or so ago, but they ask, by email, for the other nights payment on the day of travel. This has worked well at each of the Thon Hotels. Making check-in just a matter of getting the room keys and not fussing with credit cards - plus paying at 5am or 5pm doesn’t really impact on cash-flow.

Drew wakes up at 5.20am and coughs gently, indicating it is time for me to make him and I a cup of tea. We begin the ablutions process at 6am and after we have both completed, we pack our bags. We now have one very full bag of dirty clothes and a much lighter bag on the remaining clean ones, but out next laundry stop is scheduled for tomorrow, so no panic. [Editor's note: Little did I know when I wrote this!!] [Co-pilot's note: Oi, spoilers!!]

Drew had been waiting to see if the next Cruise Ship (the Ambassador) arrives on schedule at 8am this morning. But it turns out it is ahead of time, so we see it from the balcony of our room before we go down to breakfast. 

The Ambassador is a much smaller ship (1,200 people) than the ones we saw earlier in the week (5,200) and a little more nimble in turning around in the Fjord.

Breakfast

Now that we are all packed and ready for the off we head down for breakfast, arriving as they open at 7am. 

I follow the pattern of the last few days, starting with yoghurt, dried fruit and walnuts

While Drew goes directly in with the sausage, bacon, potatoes and scrambled egg

I follow with Oatmeal

And Drew has more meat

Finally it is the delight of fish four ways, three forms of pickled herring and some peppered mackerel.

The first leg - A taxi from Olden to Stryn

We go back up to the room after breakfast and leave again at 8.45am and go to check out. How quaint to give a physical key and fob back. 

The taxi, booked for 9am is outside already, so we depart at 8.50am. One of the puzzles from the beginning of booking this trip was how to get from Olden to Trondheim as every time I checked with Google maps it assumed we would be on a bus overnight! It was only on closer inspection that it became clear that the first bus from Olden to Stryn each day is the one we were on yesterday. It leaves the hotel bus stop (Muristrada) at 2.10pm. So once I tried routing us from Stryn it became clear we had a reasonable bus leaving Stryn at 10.15am, just no way to get there on public transport, hence the taxi. Here is Drew looking out of the taxi window:

Leg 2 - Stryn to Otta

Of course, being us, we targeted being in Stryn well before the bus is due to leave and arrived at 9.10am, 65 minutes early. We settled into the very comfortable VY waiting room at Stryn and the coach for Oslo (our first leg is on the VY146 bus whose whole route is from Måløy terminal (on the West Coast) to Oslo. [Co-pilot's note: The time, dear readers, went quite smoothly due to the entertainment of overhearing a conversation a young man was having on his mobile phone in English. I was trying to come up with the average of the number of words he was saying. It seemed to me to be in the region of 15 to 16 words. I was able to confirm this as his words, not the conversation coming back, as he was on speaker phone, so we had both ends of the conversation - an interesting and complicated chap - we'll leave it there.] We will change at Otta Bus Station for the VY710 bus to Trondheim. 

There is a 8 minute gap between arrival in Otta and the coach for Trondheim, but the coach leaves from the same platform at Otta and will the app says it will wait for people with through ticket booking. 

The bus arrives at 9.55am and we handover our luggage to go into the luggage area below the bus and board, we have booked to sit in the front of the bus upstairs. For some reason I thought this journey might have more sights as we travel north, but it turned out there were some great sites along the west too, last Wednesday. Thankfully the views out the window weren't bad even downstairs, but they are really good upstairs. 

Leaving Stryn

Route details for the first leg of the journey

We follow the route of the E15 road all the way from Stryn to Otta. It is a single carriageway road, sometimes a little tight for traffic to pass both ways, but the typography is the cause of this as sometimes the gap between the mountain edge and the lake is very tight. We climb and climb into the hills passing through two long tunnels through the mountain, the first 3,100 meters, the second 2,700 meters and the third 3,700 then the surrounding view becomes more what I would have expected in Switzerland not Norway! Then we are on to rugged rocky terrain and a 4.6km tunnel! Following this we have the climb back down, not so steep as the switchback bends coming up. 

Here are some of the photos from the bus:

Both of us doze off for a while at different times, I'm not sure what about the motion of the coach makes it so sleep in inducing, but it clearly does for us. 

We are amazed by some of the bus stops that are no more than pieces of tarmac in the wilderness. This one was remarkably busy for a place where no human habitation was visible

We pass through the village of Nordberg where the church is one of the best examples of Norwegian Stave churches we have seen. So far this holiday

We pass through the larger community of Fossbergum, large by local standards, Fossbergum had a roundabout and about five hotels. It has an intereresting object in the centre of the roundabout, but we couldn't read it as the coach went around. 

The app is now showing we will be 5 minutes late into Otta, luckily we don't have to worry about the change time as VY are sorting that for us. 

We arrive at Otta at 13.17pm and the temperature has risen to 19c, not something we have seen while in the Fjords and mountains. 

We get off and there is no sign of the Trondheim coach, but panic not there is an email from the VY company saying it is running 20 minutes late and will be here at 1.40pm. 

It is bright and sunny, so we stand on the platform and wait. 

Leg 3 - Otta to Trondheim

The coach arrives as promised at 1.40pm. At Otta the E15 road comes to an end. When we leave we are on the E6, the Oslo to Trondheim road. 

The bus which has come north from Lillehammer is quite full, meaning it took a while to store the luggage for us new passengers into the storage areas along the base of the coach. Job complete, we departed at 1.55pm with profuse apologies from the driver who explained in Norwegian and in English that they had had traffic delays earlier on the route. 

We settled back into the same seats as on the last coach, heading for the North and check out the stops ahead.

There aren't as many stops on this route as on the previous one, only 10 in total and the first one is 45 minutes into the journey and the last five are all in the city of Trondheim and its suburbs. 

We make reasonable progress but the bus was still 35 minutes late when we picked up passengers in Dombas. 

The land around here is quite flat, very flat compared with the hills and dales of this morning's journey, more rugged too. Plus the temperature is reducing as we get further north. It is still 19c, which is very pleasant, but not as hot as when we left Otta at 22c. 

The route doesn't have a lot of fascinating sites, but farms and quarries appear at intervals on either side of the road which seems to extend for long distances 

Drew is impressed by the number of electric car charging places even on a route like this.

Though we do hit a few hold-ups along the way

None of them are for very long. 

When we reach greater Trondheim itself we see a lot more traffic. The district of Trondheim, but not the city itself, is the third largest in Norway after Oslo and Bergen districts. 

The urban sprawl hits us as a shock after the peace of Olden, there are things like traffic lights and, very usefully for us, bus lanes which means we don't get held up in the traffic. We arrive at the Trondheim Railway Station (where the bus station is co-located) at 5.45pm - 45 minutes behind schedule 

this is well within our planning tolerance to get to the hotel, shower and change and go out for the third of our four Michelin starred meals. 

Trondheim

Nine hours from leaving the hotel in Olden to arriving in the Thon Hotel Nidaros in Trondheim, seems a long time, but it has been a comfortable journey. Though it is pleasant to arrive.

Given that we are staying in Trondheim for four days, I paid an extra 200NKr to get a Business Room - rooms in hotels here seem to go, regular, superior, business - so we have a sitting/working area and a separate bedroom as well as a huge bathroom.

Captain Jack is happy with his large bunk. 

So we shower, freshen-up and head our for dinner at 7.15pm.