Scandinavia Trip: Trollstigen, very small airport, Lillehammer

[cjsmith]

*** Mon Sept 30

Showered in the shared bathrooms, after some negotiating about who had
the room key and who would be done first. Our door was the type to
lock itself. I had a goofy moment with the shower. It was left
pointed at the far wall, which I figured was fine until I got the
temperature adjusted, so I went ahead and turned on the water. The
force of the water spun the showerhead around to spray me and a goodly
bit of the floor. Naturally the water was cold.

At breakfast we watched a forklift and some other equipment clearing
the street below us. Last night it had been pedestrian-only, covered
with picnic tables, benches, and potted trees. We expected that by
the end of the day it would be open to car traffic. It was
interesting to see a forklift picking up a picnic table and two
benches all in one swoop. It was also sad to see the street being put
away. It feels like the whole economy is shutting down. I had the
feeling I shouldn't be there. It's as if we were at an amusement park
while the owner was dismantling the rides.

We went toward Trollstigen (the Troll Ladder) to see as much as we
could before we had to turn back. We were amused by the road sign: a
standard red-bordered warning triangle with a silhouette of a troll in
it. We didn't get a superb view of the steepness of the road, but we
took a couple of pictures anyway. There was construction equipment
about half way up. I bet this is one of the few short times they have
to do any road maintenance.

On our way south we stopped to look at the Troll Wall, a very
challenging climbing route. This was climbed successfully for the
first time only in the 1960s. It looks like it was created by an
enormous rock avalanche that made a clean vertical split in the entire
cliff. I'm sure it would have been even more impressive if the upper
two-thirds had not been shrouded in clouds.

The drive was becoming boring. There is enough traffic on this fairly
major road that we kept running up against slow people, but there is
still only one lane and it can take an hour to find a place to pass.

We stopped at Slettafossen, just because it was something to do. We
walked out onto a bridge directly over the falls, got a bit wet, and
took some pictures. A kiosk across the bridge was guarded by a pair
of six-foot-tall carved and painted wooden trolls. They were really
rather endearing.

Another detour we made was to the Bjorli Flyplass. Again, the road
was definitely not the sort of thing we would expect to lead to an
airport. It was dirt, slightly bumpy, and was clearly a logging road.
We did pass a golf course, which I suppose was a good sign. Lo and
behold, after about twenty minutes, we came across a rather
deserted-looking airport. This one was pretty clearly general
aviation. The logo on the side of the big hangar said "Lesja
Fallskjermklubb" and included a parachute, and the run-up area said
(in letters very difficult to decipher from an altitude of five feet
four inches AGL) "Skydive Bjorli". The runway centerline was yellow.

We ate lunch in Domb&s, the first major town we'd seen in a long time.
It had a souvenir shop that was actually open. It had a haircut
place, a "coop" (common brand of grocery store), a tanning salon, two
places to eat, a bakery... In the cafeteria, Rob got a big bucket of
fries and I got a reindeer burger. This burger came with lettuce,
cowberry sauce (bright pink and tangy and somewhat sweet), mushrooms,
and mashed potatoes. It was an enormous meal. If no one had told me
it was reindeer, I wouldn't have known; it was a brown burger,
slightly salty, very similar to beef. I liked it.

After another interminable drive, we stopped in Hunderfossen, just
north of Lillehammer, to see if the road museum was open. It was
quite closed. At least we were able to see the posted hours; it
claimed it would open at 10am tomorrow, even though tomorrow was
October. And we did get to get out of the car for a few seconds.
Driving had not been nearly this annoying on the side roads. There,
we had had to pay attention. On E136 and E6, however, the road was
good enough that driving was easy, yet the speed limit was low enough
that keeping my mind on the road was all but impossible. Paying
attention to challenging tasks is much easier than paying attention to
boring tasks.

We arrived in Lillehammer and searched for the Olympic Museum, which
the tour book claimed would be open until six. Wrong. It was closed
completely on Mondays, and was only open until four the rest of the
time. Oh well, another time. We got to see the Olympic buildings,
which were really impressively big for a town this size. They also
had a beautiful view of the valley: the town below, the river, and the
famlands and hills on the other side.

We spent some time searching for a hotel. At least two of the places
mentioned in the Fodor book were closed for the season. (Bummer; one
of them looked like it would have been REALLY cool.) After a detour
on foot to a tourist information center (closed, but with a good map
and hotel list taped to the window), we settled on the only-mildly-
painfully-expensive Rica Hotel adjacent to the downtown pedestrian
shopping zone. This pedestrian shopping zone, by the way, had a
cobblestone street with the Olympic symbol set into it in contrasting
stones. This meant they'd redone big sections of the street in 1994.

I set off on foot to find dinner, and eventually bought some groceries
at the "Kiwi Market" (shopping carts entirely in bright lime green).
I ate crackers, Swess cheese, and ham, with fizzy lemon water to
drink, and had chocolate cake with almonds for dessert. Yum! But I
had a fair amount of leftovers.

I like the "Farris" brand of lemon fizzy water. It seems to be
available everywhere, and it tastes good.

Rob is now reading a lot of brochures on Sweden. We will have extra
time, and we're rapidly running out of things to do in Norway -- the
country is mostly shut down and the landscape is invisible in fog.
Rob keeps mentioning things we could see: the world's longest cigar, a
museum on the history of tobacco and matches, a mushroom-shaped water
tower so beloved by a prince from Saudi Arabia that he had another one
made in Riyadh, a museum on the history of tolls, an art show where
someone projects faces and other images onto trees in the park
(including e-mail and cellphone messages sent in by the audience in
real time), and the tallest structure in Scandiavia (a bridge -- no
fooling). Some of these are approaching "world's largest ball of
twine" category.

Hope I can find an Internet cafe soon. I need people's addresses
before I leave Norway; all my postcards have Norwegian stamps.