On the road

I recently read an article about being on a road trip. But it wasn't about the trip itself, but about the experience of the trip. What do you do during all those hours of driving? That specific post was about creating the optimal "soundtrack" for your trip, so you will unconsciously associate specific songs with the memories - good ones hopefully.

Well, we did not listen to much music during our road trip in Norway. Not that we would have not wanted to, but there were actually technical restrictions to do so: i) we had a radio but no channels; ii) we had phones, but not enough capacity to charge all of them all the time.

And thirdly I should say that, at least by my experience, if you are concentrated on discussions or even music you may miss the scenery. Has it ever happened to you that you had an intensive talk with someone, even just walking on the street, or driving a car, and you don't remember what was around you in the past few hundred meters/few kilometers? I prefer having memories of the landscape when on the road - if there is something worth remembering, and in Norway there definitely is!

When it comes to the radio, and Norwegian radio channels, I think I have to clear a few things here: in general, during the trip our car radio found perhaps 5 different channels, 4 of which in Bergen/Oslo urban regions. Everywhere else only one was available, if it was available. Most time it wasn't at all.

But 'coming' from a country with lots of tunnels, it was not a surprise for us that there was a radio reception in tunnels - for informational emergency purposes. Radio reception begins shortly before you enter the tunnel, and finishes right after the tunnel. In Slovenia, only one channel is available in tunnels, all the others loose the reception.

We drove through the longest road tunnel in the world (Lærdalstunnelen). It was 24,5 kilometers long and took some 20 minutes to drive from one end to another. There is a surprise in the tunnel for those driving there the first time (don't read further if you don't want to know). Every 6 kilometers or so they had built a light installation to keep drivers awake. When we approached the first one we really focused to see what is all that about: some blue light in the far distance. Once we got there, the installation looked like some Viking boat structure. It was gone in few seconds and left us a bit surprised. But then we approached another one… and by the time we got to the third one we weren't really interested any more. Later I heard that the government had given the task to the tunnel making company to come up with some ideas how to keep the drivers awake. One idea was to have words written on the wall: as a short story, which the driver could read. But eventually this (expensive) light installation won the competition. There is also a small resting area in these light installation spots, but I also heard that one should not get out of the car, because those who do, do it only to empty their bladders, so the place smells horrible.

So how did the road side scenery looked like?
I took few pictures along the way to be able to document what can you see when driving through Norway. Here are few pictures:

We also used quite many ferries to cross some of the fjords. There were two types of ferries. In one type you park your car in the ferry and continue upstairs to enjoy the view, perhaps have a hot drink. Where as in the second type you drive the car in and stay in the car for the length of the short ferry ride. The ferry rates are cheap. The price varied between 95 NOK (from Hjelmeland to Nesvik) to 276 NOK (from Halhjem to Sandvik).