Road trip to Norway

Most people who have just moved to the south of France wouldn't necessarily consider a road trip to Norway, 2,500 km (or 1555 miles) away.  That's about the equivalent of driving from Washington, DC to Colorado. But then most people aren't part of a family that includes a road warrior driver and a maps-obsessed teenager who happens to have a friend in Stavanger, Norway.

Plus, Norway is on The Places, a list we created after visiting Val & Menno and the boys in St. Martin a few years ago.  We started the list shortly after Menno dropped us off at the airport -- by dinghy -- when we started to fantasize about what our version of their sailing adventure would look like.   It was the genesis of our year here. 

So with two weeks before we could move into our house in the south, we headed north to Paris, through Hamburg, two nights in Copenhagen and then over (and through) the Oresund Bridge, the longest highway and railroad bride/tunnel combo in Europe that connects Denmark and Sweden.  We drove up the coast of Sweden to Oslo -- where we swooned over The Scream and other works by Edward Munch -- and then headed across Norway to the fabled fjords of the western coast.  And to Oystein, the Norwegian boy whom Luke befriended two summers ago during a holiday to Crete (also one of The Places).   

We drove across the top of the Hardangervidda, one of Europe's largest mountain plateaus, an oddly lunaresque landscape dotted with the occasional lake but not much more, and stopped in Geilo, about halfway between Oslo and Bergen. 

 Geilo had been billed as Norway's' most popular ski resort, but, to our surprise, the mountains were more Deep Creek Lake than Deer Valley.  Plus, we seemed to be the only people in town who weren't part of a Korean or German tour group, and we were having trouble finding a room.  [I,  planner-in-chief, had made a critical hotel mistake and we ended up fleeing the "rustic" motel that I'd booked in the middle of nowhere.] We finally found a very plain but adequate room and wandered aimlessly, a bit disappointed, until we stepped into an alluring little restaurant, Hallingsteune -- the epitome of the Norwegian word, koselig, the root of our English word, cosy.    We skipped the Reindeer Filet and Sheeps Head, but heartily enjoyed the meat sausage from a local farm, cod and salmon.  We started feeling more kindly towards Geilo... and towards each other.  The restorative power of  good food in a koselig place!