Day Twentysix - Jul 7, 2014
Geigranger, NOR
Daily Didactic
Geiranger started us off charitably. The morning at Vinje Camping was the sunny, postcard kind, with a fellow across the way fussing over a yellow tractor parked outside a sod-roofed shop, and a sausage package in the camp store that, in three earnest Norwegian words, recommended itself for all occasions. We agreed in principle. Then we drove the three miles down to the fjord and started up the red intermediate route toward Skageflå, the hanging farm bolted into the cliffs above the water. It is the kind of trail Alaskans approve of: a steep climb that leaves the town small below you, a string of abandoned farmsteads stitched into the rock, and a signpost giving you Homlongsætra at three kilometers and Skageflå at five, as if the distance were the hard part. It was not the distance. We made the clearing at Homlongsætra, admired two cabins that looked entirely too rentable, and read about a farm across the gully whose children were once kept from the edge by rope, which up there reads less as cruelty than as good sense. Then Norway changed its mind. The afternoon arrived as driving rain and a wind auditioning to take a hat, and the final stretch into the farm proper hangs on a cable drilled into vertical rock. We looked at the cable, looked at the weather, and turned around five miles in, Laura and Theresa taking the worst of the wet descent. Back at camp we dried out by an oven doing the actual work of a solar setup that was, generously, decorative, while Todd and Brian held a deeply satisfying conversation about Adobe licensing. By evening the fjord was open and politely gorgeous again. Morning sun in Geiranger, we learned, is a deposit, not a contract.
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