Trollstigen.

We had a sleepless night for which I have no known reason. Just that we were awake at 2.50 am. Absolutely no idea why, where we were camped could have been the quietest place on the planet. It must surely be the darkest place I’ve ever been. After 11.00 pm if you looked out the door you would literally see nothing! Just absolute darkness. I have to say I found it quite disconcerting. This morning Lynne decided to pose for an early morning shot in the doorway with the mountains and the trolls road in the background. You should just see the zig zag road going up in front of the cab of the motorhome and the small bridge over the waterfall on the far right of the picture.

We were at the foot of the road called Trollstigen (the trolls road) and after breakfast this morning we set off to drive up to the top. This involved lots of hairpin bends and a number of stops along the way for mediocre photographs none of which will be on display here. The road is a fantastic piece of engineering and judging by the date on the small bridge over the waterfall half way up, it must have been built sometime around 1935. As usual when we got to the top it was raining just a bit. (chucking it down again). We got out and walked to the view-point, built-in order to get the best possible view over the road and the incredible valley bellow. I had the wrong lens on but had no intention of walking all the way back to get another one as my feet were already soaked. I’d been lazy and kept on a pair of trainers that are more like slippers than anything you’d walk out in the rain in! I ended up taking two hand-held shots one above the other so as to try to make a vertical panorama, something I’ve never tried before. Here is the result. Quite successful, I’m happy to say.

We had a quick look around the crappy souvenir shop before carrying on with today’s journey. We were heading for Flam, which is quite a big tourist destination but based on our past excursions into ‘touristy towns’ I’m not expecting too much, although I realise it’s late in the season judging by the amount of campsites we’ve seen which are closed for the winter. We’ve had so much rain that it occurred to me how much trouble we would be in if that all suddenly turned to snow! Fingers crossed it doesn’t! There’s plenty of snow on the mountain tops but it seems like that’s permanent in a lot of places. Where there are glaciers it can still snow in the middle of summer apparently. As I’m writing we’re about an hour and a half from Flam but I’m tired of driving so we pulled into a roadside rest stop to wild camp for the night.