Day Twentyseven - Jul 8, 2014
Geigranger, NOR to Trollveggen, NOR
Daily Didactic
A driving day, which on this leg of the trip mostly means a good one. We said goodbye to our little cabin at Vinje Camping and the small waterfall behind it and pulled out of Geiranger just as a cruise ship was finishing the job of occupying the entire harbor. The road out of town is the sort of wonderfully windy switchback that earns you a backward look at the fjord, including a long view across to yesterday's hike along the top of the cliff and water so green it looks like somebody adjusted the saturation. Nobody did.
We took the unhurried route through Stordal, where the old wooden church turns out to be the kind that minds its own business until you step inside and find that someone has spent a few centuries painting flowers on every pillar and pew. Brian did what Brian does in the little gallery next door. Tafjord came after, a tidy village that mostly lives up the hill now, the lower half being on the record for getting erased by a tidal wave in the early 1900s, which is the sort of fact that quiets the car for a minute.
The road to Trollstigen runs past unstaffed strawberry stands often enough that we bought a carton and ate them in the camper. Then the Troll's Road itself: eleven switchbacks stacked against a wall, a waterfall down the middle, and our favorite kind of driving. At the top, Todd's arm did the work for the obligatory five-up while Theresa built a cairn on the gravel flats. Tonight's berth is the Station Manager's Apartment, a converted railway oddity tucked directly under the Troll's Wall, which does most of the decorating itself. Two Alaskan thumbs up, fifty-four miles by car, one by ferry.
Today's Photos
