Norwegian wood

I've been meaning to upload these videos from Norway for some time, but they take a while to do and I kept forgetting. Unfortunately, many of the ones I wanted to upload just got error messages - not sure if they're too big or what. If anyone needed reminding, I'm almost comically awful at shooting videos, so they tend to be wild and jerky as usual. In my defence, it was quite hard taking vids out the window because quite often trees would shoot by and block the view, so some particularly abrupt jerks are caused by me trying to move the camera to a non tree-filled zone. They're all pretty short... If you missed it, you can see some amazing (thanks to the landscape, not my mad skillz) photos and an account of our trip to the Norwegian fjords here and here.

This post doesn't really have anything to do with Norwegian wood (there are some trees in the video though), I just realised I did like 6 posts about Norway without once making that reference. Oh Gwan, what are you like?

Oh, and I just published the post and I don't know why I forgot that Blogger like compresses the video or something, so the quality is not great. I think the first one is the blurriest, the others aren't too bad if you don't enlarge the window.

Amazing mountain/fjord views

This bit was really pretty

It's foggy in them thar mountains (or valleys, as the case may be)

Quite a sweet vid of Mum & Dad by a river outside our hotel. Apparently Mum was trying to get me to turn around so she could wave at the camera for quite some time, but I couldn't hear her. That river was loud! But there you go, she got her moment in the sun after all.

 Driving along the lake/fjord

View of the morning fog as we drove along the fjords. This one comes with a Led Zeppelin soundtrack just for Mary Kay! (With apologies for copyright infringement, it was just what we were listening to at the time.)

At the bottom of the Trollstigen mountain road. Unfortunately, the sun's so strong you can barely see the road itself, but the waterfall is quite pretty

A Sunday drive in troll country

This post is mainly going to consist of pretty pictures of the fjords and lakes we saw on our drive between Sunndalsora and Trollstigen and then to the Marsdalfossen Waterfall. The Trollstigen is an insanely twisty piece of road going up a mountain - "Trollstigen" means "the troll's footpath". It has a 9% gradient and 11 hairpin bends, going up to 850 metres. My parents first came up here in the 1970s, when apparently it was just a gravel road - it must have been terrifying! I'm still amazed my mum agreed to come back. This time, it was not scary (at least for me). I'll post some videos when I get around to it.

It was hard to narrow down my selection of photos, the scenery was just mind-blowingly beautiful, and we had fantastic warm, sunny weather - couldn't have asked for better!

The drive along the fjords to Trollstigen. Then the drive to Mardalsfossen was along the right-hand side of the long lake that goes vertically up the middle of the map

In Andalsnes

Also Andalsnes

We found a troll! A friend of mine on facebook asked if he was our "Fjord Escort". Groan

Somewhere on the side of the road

At the top of the Trollstigen

The Trollstigen

The Stigfossen waterfall plummets 320 m down the mountain next to (and underneath) the Trollstigen

Not the ideal place to meet sheep on the road

Look-out point on top of the Trollstigen

Trollstigen visitors' centre, only completed in June this year. The water was amazingly clear

Stigfossen waterfall/river by the Trollstigen

I told dad you wouldn't be able to see me in the photo if he didn't come closer

In some bits, it was incredibly misty first thing in the morning

At Andalsnes

Mardalsfossen Waterfall (in the background). 650 m high

Mardalsfossen Waterfall

Stopping for a chocolate break! We had a bit of a chat with the lads behind me, turned out they were Scots who worked in Norway vaccinating salmon. Who knew that was a job?