Road Trip in Norway ‒ from East to West

I recently returned from a road trip I made with my husband, who came here on a last minute decision visit. His summary of the trip; mostly bad weather, kilometres driven, number of swims and adequate number of great photographs. I agree that we had a very windy and rainy week ‒ which made us freeze on most days, but I disagree that such a trip should be handled as numbers and pictures only, although ‒ we did drive over 2000 kilometers with an old Volvo V70 which is something worth mentioning.

My interpretation goes a bit differently. So it would not be such a burden for me, nor you, I will write some short posts not to overload anyone.
Black houses and sod roofs
When driving through the country, you get to observe the trends in bigger scale than what I have so far in my neighbourgood. It is still true that there are beautiful houses with multiple color variations, the agricultural ones usually being red. But this is not all what's out there.  Couple of additional specific types of houses can be spotted in Norway as well: One is the black house, painted with tar, and the other one is a house with roof that has grass on it. I had seen such earlier in Iceland (or see the whole posts here), but there were places where you would see whole villages, old ‒ and new ‒ built exclusively out of these.

They are houses with sod or turf roof. A traditional roof used in old times- and also today. It can be considered as one type of eco-friendly green roof which has many advantages: It works as a good natural insulator. It is permeable to water while also retaining it and recycling it through evapotranspiration. This on the other hand has a cooling effect, maintains wildlife and reduced surface water run-off. In the old days they used birch bark which worked as water proof surface when placed inside out. On top of the bark, turf was placed and the grass was let to grow. These days I don't think they use birch bark any longer, since we drove by quite many houses, which were about to have turf roof, and I saw contemporary construction materials used underneath where you would place the turf. Every day I was hoping we would see this idyllic place I had in my mind ever since I saw a picture of this kind of house: I was hoping to get a chance to take a picture, where I would have such a house facing a lake, and I would take a picture from behind having the house, the lake and mountains surrounding the lake in the frame. But this is what I got out of all the hundreds and hundreds of houses with turf roof.

A third type of house we saw which stayed in my mind can be found in fishing villages. Anyone seen a post card from Bergen?

I haven't looked into the reason of building this sort of house-complexes, but I'm sure there is a logical explanation. So far I like them, and now I know the inspiration to some modern houses I have seen around where I live. I guess the same goes with painting your house black, which I see I quite commonly here as well ‒ whereas again my interpretation leads to the old tradition of painting the houses with tar.

The next post will be about the North sea and the fjords (most likely)