Our Travels with Rover

    Because Rover was stored in the dark back corner of a very large building, we needed to tow her out into the (never-ending) Norwegian daylight in order to let the mechanic get to her problem. When we did and he did, it took only a few hours to fix the gas line. This problem had been complicated by the fact that Rover had been sitting for 11 months with very little old gas. We had been unable to put her in storage ourselves last July since nearly everyone in Norway goes on vacation for the month. So our son-in-law had driven her to storage after the owner returned to unlock the doors. We had neglected to fill her with gas, let alone give him the Stabil we’d bought just for that purpose.

    So after the fix, an oil change, and many Kroner, we were on our way to the tire store where we left even more Kroner.  (How expensive is Norway? The country recently eliminated the “penny,” with the result that now their smallest coin is worth 16 cents!)

    We were glad to get Rover back to our daughter’s home, which has a wide flat driveway/parking space. There we were able to unpack and David reinstalled the inverter/charger. It was (for him) no easy task, but it appeared to work just fine . . . for about an hour. We left everything plugged in hoping the electrical fairy would fix everything overnight. But she didn’t show up: our gauges looked exactly like they had last year.

    We were about to call the local campground for an RV technician when our daughter remembered a lovely Irishman, trained as an electrical engineer, who now works in the North Sea oil fields. He was near the end of the “off” leg of his “three weeks on-three weeks off” stint but agreed to come over and take a look at Rover’s problem. After about two hours of trouble-shooting, he found a loose ground wire and a melted wire nut with an arcing connection inside the fuse/circuit breaker box. When he corrected those two items, all the control panel indicators glowed green and everything worked  for the first time in a year! Not only that, he absolutely refused to take any money--so we left some with our daughter to buy him and his wife a very nice bottle of wine and resolved to be on the lookout for someone in need for whom we could be an angel.

   Maybe, just maybe, we will be on the road tomorrow.

    All in all, Trondheim has proved to be pretty easy . . . except for getting lost on our bikes. To begin with, the GPS led us to the city’s free “bobil parkering,” a nice big lot where half a dozen other RVs were already parked. Then we got our bikes out, re-educated ourselves on how to unfold them, carefully rode down a big hill on their very soft tires to a nearby gas station, filled the tires, and then headed further down the hill into the “sentrum”--about a 15 minute ride. Easy.

    The old city center is an island, easily walkable and full of bicycles. Our first stop was at the Nideros Cathedral, Scandinavia’s largest church building. We were charged admission to enter, and the cloudy day didn’t do justice to the stained glass windows in the dim interior. But we also heard a beautiful choir performance that evening, sung without accompaniment in that massive, echo-y space.

        (If you've been following our blog for any length of time, you'll recognize this as the inevitable "cathedral facade" photo.)

Usually we don’t go out in the evening, preferring to be back to Rover by dark. But as far north as we are now, and as close to the summer solstice, there’s no such thing as “dark.” It was barely twilight by the time the concert finished at 9 pm. So we could easily see our way home even though it was the wrong way: our GPS still thought we were a truck and didn’t want to let us go on bike paths. And much of it was uphill (like all of Norway, so far as we can tell). As a result, the return trip was considerably longer than the one into town that morning had been.

    Like most cities in Norway, Trondheim was originally built from the pine trees that grow all over the country . . . and, also like many of the nation’s cities, it has burned to the ground several times. After its last major fire, in 1681, it was rebuilt with wide streets, so it has quite a modern feel, even though many of the buildings are very old. It is also home to a large science and technical university, so there are lots of students around.

    The next day we had no trouble driving all of three miles right through the middle of the old city to another “bobil parkering” even closer to the city center (no more uphill jaunts on a folding bike, misled by a GPS, thank you very much). This lot had no services, just free 24-hour parking, but it also was only a short walk across the river to the city. With no plug-ins, we had to depend on our batteries for 12-volt and 110-volt power both days, but so far they have held up well (of course, we have hardly had to turn the lights on). 

    We spent our (mostly sunny) second day in Trondheim walking the neighborhoods . . .

. . . visiting shops and museums and reading English language papers at the library. It is amusing to see streets and alleys and whole sections of town called Brattsomething: Brattorga, Brattorgt, Brattorvieta. . . . Trondheim is on a fjord, so there are plenty of seagulls. As we walked past an outdoor cafe, we saw one swoop down and take the last bite of bread off a woman’s plate. She was very startled and upset about this large scavenger literally flying in her face. (The bird, however, seemed rather proud of himself.) Later in the day as we were eating our sandwiches on a bench, we were circled by seagulls keeping a close eye on us--as we did on them. We knew enough to keep our food out of sight, but they didn’t leave until we had finished and disposed of everything. They were . . . intimidating.

    The weather is cool and there’s often a brisk breeze: we wore gloves and headbands today, June 11. On the other hand, this is the first day since we got to Norway that it hasn’t rained even a little!

    Trondheim to Kristiansund. We are headed for the west coast and then south.  Kristiansund is a fairly large port city situated on three islands connected by impressive bridges and expensive tunnels (there’s a surprise). We have learned that motorhomes of 6 meters is the limit for the low tolls; we are 7.6, so we pay what the big trucks pay. We took our first ferry where the E39 ends at the water’s edge and continues on the other side of a 20-minute, $45 ride. By accident, we timed our arrival at the queue perfectly and waited no more than 15 minutes for the ferry. Everyone drove on and it left immediately: the toll was collected on the ferry. There were a couple other motorhomes and about 15 cars on our trip, with room for a least twice that many.

    We headed to the city and to the campground just above it. Then we walked down to the active harbor where one of the huge Hurtigruten ferries was just arriving, with a band playing on one of its decks and hundreds of passengers taking in the view of the city. But apart from that, Kristiansund was pretty closed up at 5 pm on this Friday night, so we made our way back to the campground.

    When we write “Friday night,” of course we don’t really mean “night.” The sun dipped below the horizon around 10:45 pm, after which the sky remained twilight all night long. Some evenings we will be reading and suddenly discover that it is well past our bedtime. And, of course, if we wake up at 3 or 4 am,  the sun will be shining already. Rover’s day/night shades are definitely not of room-darkening quality.

    Because we were parked right next to a water spigot in the campground, Susan gave Rover a one-pail-of-water bath, and when we filled our fresh water tank she got a quick rinse (Rover, that is).  Generally, washing motorhomes is forbidden, but we did it anyway. Worse yet, this bath required David’s sacrifice of a 23-year-old RAGBRAI t-shirt.

    Then we took off for the five mile tunnel under the fjord and headed south to the Atlantic Road and its seven bridges. It proved to be well traveled and not at all intimidating. Because we had not been able to get a picture of Rover in front of the Eiffel Tower or at Buckingham Palace, Susan was determined to get one of her (once again, that’s Rover) on the iconic bridge. Along with many others, we stopped at a pull-over spot and then David drove over the bridge to the next turn-around while Susan took pictures. Then he actually returned for her (!) and we continued south.

    The roads have been good and the traffic light.  This was a fairly short day of driving, ending up in Molde at the best campground yet. We are right on the Moldefjord, looking out at the mountains where we are headed next.

    Today we made a bus back up. Tour buses are the bullies of the Norwegian roads: they know where they are going because they have been there before so they drive fast, they take turns wide, and they often roam in gangs.

    We had made our way to Hellesylt, a small village on the (we are continually assured by the travel brochures) “world famous Geirangerfjord.” The road to the town was remarkably good until we came to a very dark, narrow, loooong tunnel. It was an old one, and (like many of a certain age we could name) it was dim, dripping water . . . and going downhill fast. Fortunately, we met only two cars in it. It spilled us out into an incredible view of the fjord that we scarcely had time to look at before the road sent us through two more short tunnels and into Hellesylt. There we found a bank, a woolen goods outlet shop, two grocery stores (right next to each other, as we often see in Norway), a ferry port, two souvenir shops and a campground whose owner shows up for an hour at 8 pm. We stayed there for two nights. 

    The next day, leaving Rover in the campground, we took the ferry tour along the fjord to the tourist trap town of Geiranger. The views are indeed magnificent.

The town was comfortably full of tourists disgorged from two large tour boats in the harbor, and we counted 50 motorhomes that, unlike us, had dared to drive mountains and hairpin curves to get there. In addition to the souvenir shops there was a very good museum half a mile up the hill that we trekked up to in the rain. We took the ferry back to Hellesylt for the night, and today we headed south.

    Today’s adventure was a 9-kilometer stretch of very narrow road. True, it had many pullover spots, but you have to hit them right: they do you no good if you’re between two of them when the truck is coming at you. Fortunately, traffic on this stretch was light, but at a construction site, after we had wormed our way through a single-lane detour, we were met by a tour bus that had pulled up so far he couldn’t be bothered to give us full access to the road. We couldn’t back up; he shrugged sneeringly, as if to insist that he could hardly be expected to, either; finally, though, he relented and did.

    Then the road went up and up with several hairpin turns before descending for miles at an 8% grade into Byrkjelo, a little village with a nice campground. We decided 67 miles of these roads were enough for today.

    And then the sun came out!

    We picked the wrong time to make our way to Voss: the week of the annual Extreme Sport Festival. We got the last spot in the campground, which is perfectly located for a visit to this town: in a park on the lake, only three blocks from the city center. But even empty it would have been a tight fit for us, as the spaces are short and close together. This week, every speck of grass had a tent on it and every tent came with a car with a kayak or some other piece of equipment attached. Some neighbors moved a car so David had a better shot at backing into our space. The place was full of young athletes and their friends. A huge festival stage and tent had been erected about a block away, so we knew we were in for a late night since the party started at 9:30 pm. But . . . location, location, location: any other campsite was miles away and all the parking spots in town were taken.  

    The weather was perfect, so we got our bikes out, found the Folk School that our son-in-law had attended some years ago, and then took the cable car to the top of the mountain. From there we watched paragliders running down the mountain and hurtling themselves into space. The view from the top was beautiful on this clear, sunny day, and in the evening a sky-diving show brought a crowd to the park.

                                    (Paraglider at 11 o'clock; festival tent above cable car; campground above tent.)

    We survived the late night with the help of earplugs. Then we headed for Bergen, eager (!) to see what new driving adventure the day would bring. We had taken a good look at the map and decided against (what one map said was) a yellow road with scores of tunnels and instead chose (what another map said was) a red road that took a slightly longer route.

    The GPS disagreed. “Make a U-turn,” it said. Usually when it tells us this, it adapts to reality after a few miles, mutters “Oh, all right,” and sulkily maps out the course we had decided on. This time, though, was different: after 5 miles of travel, the device was still insisting that we turn around...and then 10 miles.15….Worse, after those first 15 miles, we took a right turn and the road  got really narrow and winding. David put up with this for 7 miles, meeting way too much traffic. “U-turn,” insisted the GPS; and “I told you so, but would you listen?” We finally conceded, turned around and made our way back through the 7 miles, including coming to a complete standstill once while a truck scraped by as we scraped our awning support on the stone ledge on the right. We made it back to Voss and went the other way--the GPS sniggering quietly to itself, but making sure we heard--on a road with a yellow line down the middle and through many tunnels. 

    (Truth be told, we don’t actually listen to the GPS; we muted its annoying voice years ago. But its screen still prints its messages to us, and “U-turn” is one it’s particularly fond of.)

    The GPS brought us to an ugly camping place in Bergen, right on the water in an industrial area. Small and medium sized motorhomes are packed in here, and the place is full. Its sole virtue is that it is a very easy 30-minute walk over the bridge to the old city center. And since we bought the Bergen Card today, it will be a five minute bus ride to the city center for us. Location, location, location.

    (We do wonder just a little what horrors awaited us on that road we abandoned.)

    We moved on to Stavanger, a relatively easy 109 miles on the E39. But this main road ends too at the water’s edge. We had two ferry rides.  Because this is a main road the ferries are very frequent: we had to wait about 15 minutes for one and drove right on to the second. When we were still a mile from the boat landing, we knew the ferry had just come in because car after car after motorhome after big truck kept coming toward us on the highway. 

    These ferries were just as fast and efficient as the ones before--and at a similar cost ($91 for one, $86 for the other). But we pay the price because there is simply no way to get down the west coast of Norway without using ferries.

    Our campground in Stavanger was located close to the city center on a small lake. We easily biked into the city twice. The campground is a sloping field with quite a few trees and very few electrical posts, each one with half a dozen outlets. There were no clearly defined spots for RVs--people just parked anywhere they wanted--so when we told the woman in the office that we would like electricity, she told us to go see if any outlets were free. It was very different from a British campground, where every “pitch” would be laid out with geometrical precision and the office would assign campers to particular slots.

    We did find some free electrical outlets, but it was difficult to find a place to park without being right on top of someone else (which is frowned upon). We parked just off a paved path and strung out our electrical cable a long, long way. It has rained several times since we arrived, and some of the campground has turned into a swamp, reducing the available parking places. We are amazed at the number of RVers who continue to come in late at night.  We like to arrive plenty early to increase out chances of finding a spot open. (Also, we’re not on a tight schedule, so we can afford to quit driving early if we want to.)

  We really enjoyed Stavanger. The central city, smaller than Bergen, is easily walkable. We toured five different museums, among them a surprisingly interesting cannery museum. Canning sardines played a big role in the growth of this city. Today, though, it is the new oil industry. So we also toured the oil museum, detailing Norway’s newfound wealth in the North Sea.  All of this history has occurred since l969. Both museums were very well done.

    We also attended a wedding at the cathedral, completely by accident of timing. There were 21 people in the pews, and it was obvious that some of the others were also tourists. A beautiful bride in a lovely white gown and practically nobody there--it was kind of sad. 

     Like many other Norwegian towns, this one burned down somewhere in its past. The old warehouses on the wharf that have survived are now restaurants and museums.

And one old section of  historic small white wooden houses, some with lovely little gardens, still stands above the harbor.  A young man was washing his little house and Susan had the nerve to ask him what a house like his might be worth--maybe 20’ x 20’ story and a half--and he said over $500,000. “Many people like to live here,” he said. It was a truly quaint street, like a movie set: not big enough for cars.

    Like every other city we’ve been to in Norway, Stavanger’s businesses, except for restaurants, closed up at 4 pm, in spite of the fact that the streets were still full of tourists. And on Sunday, only the restaurants and some of the museums were open.

    We walked the streets and visited shops and--the high point--we bought coffee from a real coffee shop. Our Starbucks had ran out long ago, and we had been unable to find good coffee at grocery stores. So when we came upon this shop, we asked for a dark roast, ground for a french press, and indicated the size of bag we wanted.  When we got back to Rover, we figured out we had just paid about $25 for a pound of coffee.

    We roughly added up our expenses for the month of June and found we are spending money at quite an alarming rate, compared to our trips in previous years. Campgrounds are regularly $45 and up by the time pay extra for electricity and showers and usually wifi, and if we eat out we are spending $70 or $80. We don’t do McDonalds--which are here, along with Burger King--but we don’t eat at the most expensive places, either. Our costs are mainly food, campgrounds, gas and museums, so it’s kind of hard to find a place to cut back. 

    The last few days seem to be repeating themselves. Each new town we visit along Norway’s south coast has an old section of little wooden white houses, an abundance of flowers, busy harbors and ever more beautiful views out to sea.  

    We stumbled into a free overnight parking place in Grimstad, a lovely town  that claims to be the sunniest place in Norway. It certainly lived up to its reputation during our visit. As we approached the town, wondering where we could possibly park, we took a chance by turning at a sign that promised “parking.” Most often this tactic leads only to an impossibly small lot for small cars, but this time it rewarded us with a jettty featuring a “Motorhome Parkering 24 timer max”  sign and space for five RVs. It was a great place to be: right on the water and right in the middle of everything. We enjoyed a visit to the Henrik Ibsen museum, set in the building where he worked for six years as a pharmacist’s apprentice. The original pharmacy still exists with its original equipment.

In the afternoon we stopped for coffee at the Cafe Ibsen across the street from the museum and used their WiFi to watch the Tour de France on our computer. The cafe closed at 4 pm (!) but they let us stay until they locked up, after which one of the waitresses gave us a bag of four large pastries that she said they would otherwise have to throw away. We then moved on to a bar, where for the price of nachos. salsa and orange pop we watched the end of the race on their wide-screen. Free parking, free food, free tv, sunshine . . . what’s not to like about Grimstad?

    The great weather continued the next day, when we visited two more towns--two more neighborhoods of white houses, churches, harbors and market places. In one of them, we first found ourselves in a too tight parking lot too far from the “sentrum”; regrouping (and paying more heed to our GPS), we then made our way to one in the center of town where Rover’s back end hung out over the sea.

    We are starting to see the influx of vacationers of which the guide books warned us. In Risør, many many large saillboats were gathering as part of some tour or another.

We’re also seeing the boosted prices that define high season: a night at a large family camping place, paying $66 for the privilege, and two loads of laundry (including only one use of the dryer) for $20.  

    The roads have gotten busier and also wider as we get closer to Oslo; we even get four lanes occasionally. We drove into Porsgrunn (where Susan successfully read a detour sign in time to notify the GPS) and visited the porcelain outlet. We also hit a second Henrik Ibsen museum--this time the farm where he grew up outside Skien. Norwegians are clearly very proud of their favorite son and do a really good job with these museums. The only thing they don’t do well is signpost to them: often we would see a sign at a traffic circle pointing us in the right direction, but then never see another at any of the next four crucial intersections; worse, the museum would not come up on the GPS. Finally we made our way to another museum in Skien, where the clerk told us how to get there. (The staff at the Ibsen Museum sympathized with us but blamed the local government bureaucracy for not dealing with the signage properly.)

    Part of the Ibsen Museum’s program included a film about his plays which mentioned the Commonweal Theatre in Lanesboro, Minnesota, near where we once lived. But the narrator referred to it as “Lanesboro, Minneapolis.”   Since this error is on film, that’s one correction that won’t get made soon. 

    On Sundays everything (including many churches) is closed except for a few museums. Now headed north towards Oslo, we stopped in Sandefjord to see the whaling fountain and museum. Apart from a huge ferry just leaving for Denmark, the streets, parking lots, and sea were empty. Whaling used to be the economic engine of this town; now it’s ferries and tourists, but not so much of either on Sundays.

    We had seen an advertisement for a Viking Market in Borre National Park.  We couldn’t find it on the GPS or any map, but we did find a little town called Borre, so because we were headed in that general direction anyway, we decided to see what we could find.

    We came upon hundreds of people walking from hundreds of cars towards something of obvious interest. So we drove to the next traffic circle and came back (we’ve grown to appreciate traffic circles just for this reason). While attempting to park, we found we were very close to a crowded campground, so we decided to stay there for the night. Then we joined everyone else walking to the Viking Market.

    This proved to be a Renaissance Faire kind of thing with the emphasis on selling goods, located in a park that included Viking burial mounds and a museum on a hill. There were hundreds of tents--no Coleman tents here: all of them “the real thing”--crowded together under the trees along the fjord. They were selling anything that could possibly be considered Viking: leather goods, jewelry, clothing, yarn, toys, weapons, pottery.

All the vendors and many of the visitors were in costume. People were cooking over fires, and there were a few fun demonstrations going on--all very festive and fun. It took us quite a while to take it all in. And not a single horned helmet or purple football jersey anywhere. We were glad to be close by in the campground when the whole thing closed down at 6 pm.

    Oslo has been great fun: two days of mostly rain, followed by three days of sunshine. The campground remains a mud pit in places and we are amazed that people aren’t getting stuck as they leave or come in, dozens per day in each direction. We kept an eye out for neighbors leaving, and after the first night were able to plug in on our side of the road. On Sunday we discovered that in our absence, the electricity had stopped coming in, which scared us in light of our past electrical problems. But we think it may merely have gotten wet because it has worked fine after we reset the circuit breaker in the campground’s outlet box. (David was particularly relieved because the problem was on the level of the elementary sort of things he understands and can do something about with confidence.)

    One of the worst things about this campground is the noise from neighbors (probably unavoidable when you’re alongside vacationers whose idea of a good time is to take the dogs along and let the kids run around outside until midnight). One of the best things is the  easy access into the city center. Buses arrive every 15 minutes at a stop at the campground’s front gate, and 10 minutes later we are in the sentrum. We bought Oslo Passes which we thought would cost us $80 each but instead found we qualified for the “senior” (Pensioners) rate of $23 apiece. This gave us free access to transportation (including ferries) and most museums for three days-- a really great deal!  

    Oslo has proved to be better than we’d expected. The first place we visited was the new Opera House, its roof sloping into the fjord and inviting people to walk on it (as they do, in great numbers).

Of course, we also visited many museums, all of them very well done. We have seen Thor Heyerdahl’s actual Kon Tiki from 1947 and Ra II from 1970. We also saw three Viking burial ships more than a thousand years old--not only were the ships and the dead royalty buried, but also the everyday stuff thought to be needed for the afterlife: food, tools, household goods, clothing, sleds, horses! (And not a horned helmet among them.) The ships were huge--100+ feet long.

In another museum we were allowed on Roald Amundsen’s Polarship Fram--the actual ship, enclosed indoors--from his trip to the North Pole in l893-96. It spent three years trapped in ice (by design).

    We also went to a third Henrik Ibsen museum--surely all that anyone, even theatre people, should be expected to visit--this one the apartment where he spent the last 11 years of his life. His study is just as he left it, including the portrait of August Strindberg over the fireplace. (Ibsen said he needed his rival’s “mad eyes” staring down at him to motivate him to write.)  Since he was a wealthy man by then it was quite a well appointed place--just across the street from the Royal Palace. And of course we also visited the Vigeland sculpture garden, along with everyone else in Norway, who was glad to get out into the sunshine after a few days of rain. 

    We were thinking these had been pretty impressive days . . . but then came Sunday. We had saved a few free museums because our three-day Oslo passes had expired, so we first stopped at the Rådhus (city hall), not knowing what to expect. We were absolutely blown away. It is in this building’s great marble hall that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded every year. The place is filled with painted murals that are just captivating. We decided it was the best part of the trip so far. (If you visit, it might be worthwhile to wait until a Sunday, when none of the other meeting rooms, also beautifully muraled, are being used for ordinary political business.)

    Three times we have been able to end our day in the city by finding a sports bar and watching the end of the Tour de France. It’s a great way to relax after being on our feet so much of the day. And that’s when it rained again today--while we were safely inside.

Before Norway slips out of our memory bank entirely--don’t laugh, it’s getting easier and easier for that sort of thing to happen--here’s a tutorial of miscellaneous notations for Americans driving around parts of Europe.

Followed, with your indulgence, by a rant.

1. The first bit of notation is specific to Norway and Sweden (and maybe Finland and Denmark, too, but we haven’t been there yet):

Numbers like these appear on parking signs and shop fronts; occasionally they’re even painted on buildings. They refer to things like a store’s opening hours or, as here, the times of day when you need to feed the parking meter. The first set of numbers refers to Monday through Friday hours; the second, in parentheses, is for Saturday; occasionally you’ll also see a second set of parentheticals for Sunday. (You won’t often see that second set in Norway because just about everything in the country is closed on Sunday.)

2. If you do find a grocery open on Sunday in Norway and make your way to the beer cooler, you may see this:

If the store is not in a high-density-tourist area, the helpful explanatory sign will be missing, leaving only the piece of canvas covering the beer cooler, as if to avoid taunting you with the sight of what you’re not allowed to buy on Sunday.

3. These next two are important, and they can be found all over Europe. They can cause more trouble than you might think, especially for American drivers, who aren’t used to them.

You’ll usually see the first sign (top left) along major highways. It means you are on a “priority” road, i.e., you don’t have to yield to traffic that is intersecting your road; instead, if the intersection is not controlled by a traffic light or a sign of some sort, you can drive through the intersection as if the other vehicles did have a stop sign.

    And, after you’ve been driving in Europe and seen lots of black diagonal slashes on signs, you know that the sign on the bottom right one means you are on a “non-priority” road. Usually, you’ll see it on a highway that formerly had had priority status but has had that status suspended in a built-up area.

    So what’s the big deal about non-priority roads? It’s this: when you’re on a non-priority road  you are required to yield the right-of-way to any traffic entering your road from your righthand side. 

    The point of this practice, I’m told, is to reduce the speed of all traffic in a built-up area by making all drivers, regardless of the nature of the road they’re on, come to a stop when a vehicle approaches from their right (again, intersections controlled by traffic lights or some other signage are an exception).

    One problem with this practice is that the poor driver--usually American--busily trying to cope with city traffic, pedestrians at crosswalks, signage in a foreign language, traffic signals in unfamiliar locations at intersections, etc., now has yet another thing to notice and keep track of: “Now I’m non-priority . . . OK, now I’m priority again . . . [crash] . . . oops, I guess I missed that last non-priority notice. . . .”

    Another problem is that the whole system depends on every driver at an intersection knowing the “priority” status of every other driver’s roadway. If I’m on a non-priority road when I approach an intersection, my success at avoiding a collision may depend on whether I know the “priority” status of the guy approaching the intersection from my left: if (I know) the other road has priority, I yield; if (I know) it does not, I don’t; but (here’s the kicker) if I think I know but I’m wrong, there’s a 50-50 chance I’ll be pulling into the intersection in front of a driver who wasn’t planning to stop.

    Happy motoring.

4. The Rant

    Norway is justifiably proud of Henrik Ibsen. After all, the history books call him “The Father of Modern Theatre” (that should be “European” or “Western” Modern Theatre, but who’s counting).

    And so:

--while he was living abroad for decades, building his international reputation by churning out masterpieces that trashed his native land for its philistinism and provincialism (and weather), his fellow countrymen bore it in silence;

--when toward the end of his life he deigned to return to Norway to live, they showered him with honors;

--when every noon he entered the Grand Cafe in Oslo for his customary midday meal, they rose from their tables and remained standing until he was seated (or so the waiter there assured us when we asked which was his table);

--at his death, they established three museums to him in places he’d lived around the country. (And, maybe most remarkably, they saw to it that the commentaries on his life and works in these museums were exceptionally insightful and the tour guides staffing them extraordinarily knowledgeable about his life and personality.) 

--And, of course, they also erected his statue in front of the National Theatre in Oslo

and bade the artists working there keep his plays alive so that (as they love to point out . . . but modestly, ever so diffidently) he will continue to be the second-most-performed playwright--trailing only Shakespeare. And that, unlike the “Father of Modern Theatre” business, is not only in Europe or the West but throughout the world.

    So then: Truly, Ibsen was a remarkable talent, and Norwegians are rightfully proud of his legacy and should do what they can to keep it alive around the land. Most particularly, they should do so at the country’s flagship dramatic institution, the National Theatre in Oslo (where they erected his statue, remember).

Ahem.

About that National Theatre.

But first, about Oslo:

Oslo is, of couse, the capital city of Norway, and many roads lead to it.

And Norway is one of the many countries in Europe that (virtually) shuts down during the month of July and sends (nearly) everybody off on vacation.

And because Oslo is the capital city and many roads lead to it,

--and because Norwegians are a really patriotic people,

--and also because Oslo is pretty far south (pretty far for Norway, anyhow), so the weather there might be expected to be warmer than most other places in the country . . .

for all these reasons, lots and lots of Norwegians spend at least part of their vacation … in Oslo.

(And lots of other Europeans come there, too, as well as quite a few Americans, because it’s a really lovely city, and because maybe they can learn somthing--you think?--from the people of Norway about things like . . .

oh, I don’t know .  .

things like how to keep their citizens alive longer at less cost 

and how to give science a leading role in establishing policies about their environment 

and how to discourage drunk driving by taking away their licenses at the slightest whiff of alcohol instead of this “.06,” “ .08” crap, 

and how to encourage healthy family life with maternity and paternity leaves at full pay and subsidized early childhood education and don’t get me started. . . .

(But I digress.

Where was I?

Oh, yes.)

So the point is--the points are--

(a) Ibsen continues to be really important to Norwegians and to the country’s cultural identity; 

(b) there are hoardes of Norwegians in Oslo in July; 

(c) Oslo is where the National Theatre, dedicated to the preservation of Ibsen’s works, is; and 

(d) seeing a first-class production of one of a guy’s plays--instead of just reading it, say, or, God help us, being reduced to talking about it in a classroom--seeing a play is a really good way of coming to appreciate the work and how the guy’s mind works.

(Can you see where I’m going here?)

Conclusion: July would be an awfully good time for Norway’s National Theatre to be busy as hell, doing Ibsen plays as well as they can do them. . . .

But they don’t do it!

The National Theatre is closed. 

And not just in July: it’s closed all summer!!

WHAT’S  UP  WITH  THAT?

    We left really early for the ferry to Finland, once again crossing the bridge forbidden by our GPS, and driving less than two miles to the landing. They offered us use of electricity on board, which we gladly accepted: since we had to have the LP tank sealed in the “off” position, not having electricity would mean the refrigerator would be off or running on battery power for the twelve-hour trip. But when we returned to Rover at the end of the voyage, we found that something had tripped the main circuit breaker, and those few battery lights that remained were glowing red. (Surely there’s a moral to this story, but we don’t know enough about electricity to figure out what it is.)

    Susan slept for ten hours of the twelve-hour trip and found a bit of time to look up her intestinal problem on the internet. It was just enough information to get her really worried. With a little help from the Viking Line information desk and a call to the US Embassy in Helsinki, we were instructed how to get to a hospital emergency room in Turku. So within 15 minutes of driving off the ferry, we were sitting in the waiting room, with Rover parked in a perfectly level and mostly free parking lot.

    They did some blood tests, gave her some meds and told her to come back in the morning. So we stayed right in the parking lot overnight, running the engine for a while to bring the batteries back. In the morning they took x-rays and then transfered her by ambulance to a bigger hospital, where she had a CT scan and was admitted with a severe kidney infection. Rover is staying put right in the first hospital’s parking lot. Not at all what we had planned, but all part of the adventure.

    This post has virtually nothing to do with camping in Europe. It is, rather, a brief description of our brief trip to St Petersburg, Russia.

    Leaving Rover and the computer behind in the campground in Helsinki, we took an overnight ferry to St Petersburg. Before leaving the U.S., we had purchased a tour that allows entry into Russia without a visa for a 3-day stay with a firm exit date. It didn’t offer a way through customs, though, so after an interminable wait in that line, we were met by our young guide, Anna, and a driver and given a three-hour car tour of the city. It got us oriented, and we also received good advice about how to get around in the city. So after Anna dropped us off at the hotel in the early afternoon, we immediately headed for the ATM machine in the lobby, took out 1000 Russian rubles . . . and when we got to our room, we figured out we had just gotten the grand sum of $30. So on our way out, we got another 6000 rubles and left for the subway and the central city.

    St. Petersburg is remarkably clean--even the heavily used subway, which had the longest escalators we have ever seen: fully a 2-½ minute trip from top to bottom. Many of the buildings are beautifully decorated, and the bright colors of their facades surprised us. But up close, most look to be in need of plaster repair and a fresh coat of paint. Every one has several large downspouts painted to match the building.  Susan finally stopped and measured one: 8-½ inches diameter.

    The main shopping street, Nevsky Prospect, is 8 lanes wide with few opportunities to cross, and is fronted by opulent buildings. Once we left Nevsky Prospect, though, we often could hardly tell whether we were passing by shops or not: there were few big display windows, lots of closed doors, and no markings to distinguish them from private entrances. Purely through stubbornness, we did find a theatre museum--it started on the third floor of the building--with four old ladies who made sure that we saw the whole thing . . . leading us from room to room, turning lights on and off as we entered and left, and seeing to it that we operated the wind and rain and thunder machines. The many scene design models ranged from antiquity to the high point of Russian theatre in the 1920s. But nothing was translated from Russian. In fact, outside of the hotel, we found very few clerks or wait staff who spoke any English.

    We also visited three Orthodox churches: one where all the Tzars are buried, another with mosaics that rival Ravenna, Italy, a third filled with icons . . . and all of them over the top with gold leaf.

                                          The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (!) marks the site of Tzar Alexander II's assassination.

To bring us back to earth, that evening we ate really bad fish and chips at the hotel and watched the Olympics.

    The next morning Anna and a different driver took us on a tour of the Hermitage.  What used to be an opulent winter palace for the Tzars is now a (still opulent) art museum.

Anna knew her way around, knew--and loved--Russian history, and knew what we wanted to see. Because we’d bought tickets ahead of time, we could avoid standing in line, and we skipped whole floors and wings of things we weren’t interested in (“Do you want to stay here after our time together is over?” she asked. “How much haven’t we seen?” we replied. “About 99%,” she said, smirking just a bit).

    The Hermitage is an impressive place, but after four hours on our feet--accompanied by considerable Marxist aesthetics from Anna--we were ready for lunch. Anna recommended a restaurant we never would have discovered on our own: once again, there was nothing outside or on the door to indicate to an American that it was a restaurant, but it proved to be popular place with the locals: meat pies, fish pies, vegetable pies, and of course, dessert fruit pies. We had a delicious lunch for $17.75, including dessert and coffee.

    And then we were on our own. Anna had assured us that the pickpocket and thug stories we’d read about were exaggerations, but we remained careful and alert anyway, and came away without incident. Later that afternoon, we took a boat tour in English that she had suggested.  St. Petersburg is built on islands, in the midst of one major river and many small canals. The sky darkened as we waited for the boat, and within minutes of boarding a  downpour drove us all inside. It rained off and on for the whole hour of the tour. Once again we had barely avoided getting soaked.

    On Sunday morning we got out of the historical city center and went to a huge market in an older part of town. It went on for blocks and blocks: about a quarter of it in newer sheds, selling new goods, and the rest on tables and plastic sheets spread on the ground. Susan bought a child’s plastic sewing machine and considered it a find at $3.

    We then walked and walked, unsuccessfully seeking two other museums/shops the Lonely Planet guide had mentioned, and finally returned to the hotel to get our luggage and be picked up by a third driver, who took us to the ferry.

    Both overnight ferry crossings were smooth. It takes an hour just to get out of the huge harbor at St Petersburg and into open water. A large part of the ship is devoted to partying, with bars and casino and duty-free shopping staying open all night. We had dinner and fell exhausted into bed.

    We arrived back in Helsinki at 8 a.m., and after another long wait through customs got back to Rover in the campground by 10. She was waiting just as we had left her: refrigerator running, and all the appropriate monitors glowing green. Best of all, Susan’s stomach has stopped complaining every times she feeds it. It feels good to be “home” again.

    It was David’s turn to feel sick: in his case, just really, really tired. So Susan drove out of Helsinki and all the way to Turku campground while David slept. Before we left the Helsinki campground, we filled the fresh water tank and dumped the black and gray water. This was the first time in 14 days that we had dumped--a record for us. But then Susan had been in the hospital for four of those days, and our St Petersburg trip kept us away for four nights. Still, we knew we were pushing our luck and decided to be careful lest we have to unplug and level again.  

    After sleeping for about 20 hours straight, David felt better again and we drove into Turku to visit their handicraft museum. This place is about a city block of 250-year-old wooden houses that survived the inevitable fire--this one in 1827--that had destroyed much of the city. The buildings are all in their original place and are now craft workshops and museums of a wide variety. More than half of the buildings were locked up, but it was still an interesting glimpse of what life had been like 250 years ago.

After that, we drove back to the hospital parking lot where we had parked for five nights while Susan was in the hospital. We wanted to be close to the ferry to Stockholm that was scheduled to sail early the next morning.   

    We were one of the last vehicles to be waved onboard the ferry . . . directed alongside a daunting row of 18-wheelers . . . just barely squeezing past . . . almost all the way to the bow of the ship . . . right in line to be one of the first ones off. We opted to shut down the refrigerator for the 12-hour trip rather than plug in to the ship’s generated current and risk some electrical problem like the one we’d had on the journey to Finland. (As it turned out, everything in the refrigerator seemed to survive without any problem.)

    We had opted to pay a little extra for a private cabin (inboard; no window), so we would have a place to rest away from the many passengers who regarded the journey as a fine excuse to party--and the ship line, who encouraged this attitude by hiring Elvis-impersonators to entertain at 3:00 in the afternoon. Nevertheless, we did spend quite a bit of time at a good table right at the prow (but inside, protected from the wind). There is surprisingly little open water between Finland and Sweden, and from our table we could watch the ferry wending through the archipelago of rocky little islands as we left Turku. More than four hours later, we finally left them behind . . . only to soon be amid others like them as we approached Stockholm.

    We were, indeed, one of the first off the ferry, and at the stoplight at the end of the wharf a sign directed us to the E4, so we were quickly on our way to Uppsala, 40 miles to the north. We found the city’s campground and chose a site outside its small Wifi zone rather than park closer to the antenna but next to a noisy group with children racing about and adults clearly planning a big outdoor party (do we sound like kill-joys, or what?). On Sunday we rode our bikes an easy ten minutes into the city, stopping first at the cathedral, where the choir was rehearsing for a service about to start. This cathedral is the largest in all of Scandinavia: red brick, undecorated, with two towers, each as high as the building is long.

     Unlike its plain, unadorned exterior, the cathedral had quite a lot of painted detail inside. We stayed for the first part of the service, but sat way in the back so we could easily sneak out, since we didn’t think we could make it through an hour and a half service--or so it was billed--in Swedish! We went in search of museums, and even on a Sunday were able to find a couple that were open. One was the home and garden of Carl Linnaeus, the biologist responsible for some of the systematic taxonomy we all learned in Biology 101. It was a lovely “fireproof” home that had survived the fire of 1702 that destroyed much of that city. (How many places on this trip have we heard of a fire destroying an entire city? Everywhere we go, it seems.)

    We fell in  love with Uppsala. It is a lovely university town: tree-lined streets and boulevards, tree-lined riverfront,  hundreds of bike racks filled with thousands of bicycles, flowers everywhere, students even more plentiful. It is hard to imagine it on a cold, dark midwinter day.

We stayed an extra night and went into the city again and visited the Carolina Rediviva (university library), where there is a Bible from the 6th century. And then, duly edified, we walked the shopping streets with everyone else.

    We are heading east now, back to Norway. We are in Hallestammer, at our first campground with a swimming pool that is both free and open: 50 meters long, 8 lanes wide, alongside several smaller kiddie pools, all available to the public, but free to campers. We finally got our swim suits wet.

    As we came closer to Norway, the flat farm fields of Sweden changed to rocky wooded hills. Just before reaching the border, we stopped to fill up with gas at the lower Swedish prices. The station was located in a large shopping center where the parking lot was full of cars with Norwegian license plates. We also counted twenty motorhomes there. Everyone was stocking up at the lower prices. We bought just a couple of things at the grocery store, but the guy behind us had eight 2-lb. packages of ground beef.  

    We are now back on Norway’s toll roads. There were no tolls in Sweden or Finland, but in Norway you drive through toll cameras every 20 miles or so. If you are going to travel for several weeks in Norway as we did, it is necessary to set up an account with a credit card: the Norwegian authorities then charge a couple of hundred dollars to the card and subtract the toll from that amount every time we drive past one of their many cameras. If necessary, they load more money into the account. Eventually--well after the end of your travels--they refund what’s left over. We had set up an account before we began driving through Norway at the beginning of this year’s trip; later, we had to set up a second account before our return into the country a second time. As a result, we have no idea how much tolls have cost us, because it will take a while before the Norwegian authorities reimburse our credit card account.

    We stopped for one more day (two nights) in Oslo. The campground was much less busy this time, we had no problem finding an electric hookup . . . and our view of the city wasn't blocked by other campers.

Also, getting to the campground this time, from the south and east, was a whole lot easier than approaching from the west and through the city had been a month ago. But if you are going to spend only one day in Oslo, don’t make it a Monday: anything worth visiting is closed.

    On Tuesday we drove our final lap to Lillehammer.

                                                             At Lillehammer's Olympic ski jump.

Along the way we found two more caravan stores that didn’t have RV antifreeze. We thought we were about to buy a large quantity of the world’s most expensive vodka (taxes on alcohol here being very high). But David read an internet help site on which the answer to winterizing a cabin cruiser’s water system involved “plumber’s antifreeze”; at about the same time, someone suggested we speak to a plumber about how people in Norway winterize water lines in a summer cabin; we did, and were sold 3.5 liters of a concentrated, non-toxic, lightly tinted liquid we are supposed to dilute with a liter of water.

    To celebrate, we then spent the day giving Rover a much-needed bath and interior cleaning.

    We have travelled 3538 miles, and after we have returned home and added up all our kroner (both Swedish and Norwegian), euros, rubles and dollars, we will post a final blog entry in early September.

    Because Rover was stored in the dark back corner of a very large building, we needed to tow her out into the (never-ending) Norwegian daylight in order to let the mechanic get to her problem. When we did and he did, it took only a few hours to fix the gas line. This problem had been complicated by the fact that Rover had been sitting for 11 months with very little old gas. We had been unable to put her in storage ourselves last July since nearly everyone in Norway goes on vacation for the month. So our son-in-law had driven her to storage after the owner returned to unlock the doors. We had neglected to fill her with gas, let alone give him the Stabil we’d bought just for that purpose.

    So after the fix, an oil change, and many Kroner, we were on our way to the tire store where we left even more Kroner.  (How expensive is Norway? The country recently eliminated the “penny,” with the result that now their smallest coin is worth 16 cents!)

    We were glad to get Rover back to our daughter’s home, which has a wide flat driveway/parking space. There we were able to unpack and David reinstalled the inverter/charger. It was (for him) no easy task, but it appeared to work just fine . . . for about an hour. We left everything plugged in hoping the electrical fairy would fix everything overnight. But she didn’t show up: our gauges looked exactly like they had last year.

    We were about to call the local campground for an RV technician when our daughter remembered a lovely Irishman, trained as an electrical engineer, who now works in the North Sea oil fields. He was near the end of the “off” leg of his “three weeks on-three weeks off” stint but agreed to come over and take a look at Rover’s problem. After about two hours of trouble-shooting, he found a loose ground wire and a melted wire nut with an arcing connection inside the fuse/circuit breaker box. When he corrected those two items, all the control panel indicators glowed green and everything worked  for the first time in a year! Not only that, he absolutely refused to take any money--so we left some with our daughter to buy him and his wife a very nice bottle of wine and resolved to be on the lookout for someone in need for whom we could be an angel.

   Maybe, just maybe, we will be on the road tomorrow.

    All in all, Trondheim has proved to be pretty easy . . . except for getting lost on our bikes. To begin with, the GPS led us to the city’s free “bobil parkering,” a nice big lot where half a dozen other RVs were already parked. Then we got our bikes out, re-educated ourselves on how to unfold them, carefully rode down a big hill on their very soft tires to a nearby gas station, filled the tires, and then headed further down the hill into the “sentrum”--about a 15 minute ride. Easy.

    The old city center is an island, easily walkable and full of bicycles. Our first stop was at the Nideros Cathedral, Scandinavia’s largest church building. We were charged admission to enter, and the cloudy day didn’t do justice to the stained glass windows in the dim interior. But we also heard a beautiful choir performance that evening, sung without accompaniment in that massive, echo-y space.

        (If you've been following our blog for any length of time, you'll recognize this as the inevitable "cathedral facade" photo.)

Usually we don’t go out in the evening, preferring to be back to Rover by dark. But as far north as we are now, and as close to the summer solstice, there’s no such thing as “dark.” It was barely twilight by the time the concert finished at 9 pm. So we could easily see our way home even though it was the wrong way: our GPS still thought we were a truck and didn’t want to let us go on bike paths. And much of it was uphill (like all of Norway, so far as we can tell). As a result, the return trip was considerably longer than the one into town that morning had been.

    Like most cities in Norway, Trondheim was originally built from the pine trees that grow all over the country . . . and, also like many of the nation’s cities, it has burned to the ground several times. After its last major fire, in 1681, it was rebuilt with wide streets, so it has quite a modern feel, even though many of the buildings are very old. It is also home to a large science and technical university, so there are lots of students around.

    The next day we had no trouble driving all of three miles right through the middle of the old city to another “bobil parkering” even closer to the city center (no more uphill jaunts on a folding bike, misled by a GPS, thank you very much). This lot had no services, just free 24-hour parking, but it also was only a short walk across the river to the city. With no plug-ins, we had to depend on our batteries for 12-volt and 110-volt power both days, but so far they have held up well (of course, we have hardly had to turn the lights on). 

    We spent our (mostly sunny) second day in Trondheim walking the neighborhoods . . .

. . . visiting shops and museums and reading English language papers at the library. It is amusing to see streets and alleys and whole sections of town called Brattsomething: Brattorga, Brattorgt, Brattorvieta. . . . Trondheim is on a fjord, so there are plenty of seagulls. As we walked past an outdoor cafe, we saw one swoop down and take the last bite of bread off a woman’s plate. She was very startled and upset about this large scavenger literally flying in her face. (The bird, however, seemed rather proud of himself.) Later in the day as we were eating our sandwiches on a bench, we were circled by seagulls keeping a close eye on us--as we did on them. We knew enough to keep our food out of sight, but they didn’t leave until we had finished and disposed of everything. They were . . . intimidating.

    The weather is cool and there’s often a brisk breeze: we wore gloves and headbands today, June 11. On the other hand, this is the first day since we got to Norway that it hasn’t rained even a little!

    Trondheim to Kristiansund. We are headed for the west coast and then south.  Kristiansund is a fairly large port city situated on three islands connected by impressive bridges and expensive tunnels (there’s a surprise). We have learned that motorhomes of 6 meters is the limit for the low tolls; we are 7.6, so we pay what the big trucks pay. We took our first ferry where the E39 ends at the water’s edge and continues on the other side of a 20-minute, $45 ride. By accident, we timed our arrival at the queue perfectly and waited no more than 15 minutes for the ferry. Everyone drove on and it left immediately: the toll was collected on the ferry. There were a couple other motorhomes and about 15 cars on our trip, with room for a least twice that many.

    We headed to the city and to the campground just above it. Then we walked down to the active harbor where one of the huge Hurtigruten ferries was just arriving, with a band playing on one of its decks and hundreds of passengers taking in the view of the city. But apart from that, Kristiansund was pretty closed up at 5 pm on this Friday night, so we made our way back to the campground.

    When we write “Friday night,” of course we don’t really mean “night.” The sun dipped below the horizon around 10:45 pm, after which the sky remained twilight all night long. Some evenings we will be reading and suddenly discover that it is well past our bedtime. And, of course, if we wake up at 3 or 4 am,  the sun will be shining already. Rover’s day/night shades are definitely not of room-darkening quality.

    Because we were parked right next to a water spigot in the campground, Susan gave Rover a one-pail-of-water bath, and when we filled our fresh water tank she got a quick rinse (Rover, that is).  Generally, washing motorhomes is forbidden, but we did it anyway. Worse yet, this bath required David’s sacrifice of a 23-year-old RAGBRAI t-shirt.

    Then we took off for the five mile tunnel under the fjord and headed south to the Atlantic Road and its seven bridges. It proved to be well traveled and not at all intimidating. Because we had not been able to get a picture of Rover in front of the Eiffel Tower or at Buckingham Palace, Susan was determined to get one of her (once again, that’s Rover) on the iconic bridge. Along with many others, we stopped at a pull-over spot and then David drove over the bridge to the next turn-around while Susan took pictures. Then he actually returned for her (!) and we continued south.

    The roads have been good and the traffic light.  This was a fairly short day of driving, ending up in Molde at the best campground yet. We are right on the Moldefjord, looking out at the mountains where we are headed next.

    Today we made a bus back up. Tour buses are the bullies of the Norwegian roads: they know where they are going because they have been there before so they drive fast, they take turns wide, and they often roam in gangs.

    We had made our way to Hellesylt, a small village on the (we are continually assured by the travel brochures) “world famous Geirangerfjord.” The road to the town was remarkably good until we came to a very dark, narrow, loooong tunnel. It was an old one, and (like many of a certain age we could name) it was dim, dripping water . . . and going downhill fast. Fortunately, we met only two cars in it. It spilled us out into an incredible view of the fjord that we scarcely had time to look at before the road sent us through two more short tunnels and into Hellesylt. There we found a bank, a woolen goods outlet shop, two grocery stores (right next to each other, as we often see in Norway), a ferry port, two souvenir shops and a campground whose owner shows up for an hour at 8 pm. We stayed there for two nights. 

    The next day, leaving Rover in the campground, we took the ferry tour along the fjord to the tourist trap town of Geiranger. The views are indeed magnificent.

The town was comfortably full of tourists disgorged from two large tour boats in the harbor, and we counted 50 motorhomes that, unlike us, had dared to drive mountains and hairpin curves to get there. In addition to the souvenir shops there was a very good museum half a mile up the hill that we trekked up to in the rain. We took the ferry back to Hellesylt for the night, and today we headed south.

    Today’s adventure was a 9-kilometer stretch of very narrow road. True, it had many pullover spots, but you have to hit them right: they do you no good if you’re between two of them when the truck is coming at you. Fortunately, traffic on this stretch was light, but at a construction site, after we had wormed our way through a single-lane detour, we were met by a tour bus that had pulled up so far he couldn’t be bothered to give us full access to the road. We couldn’t back up; he shrugged sneeringly, as if to insist that he could hardly be expected to, either; finally, though, he relented and did.

    Then the road went up and up with several hairpin turns before descending for miles at an 8% grade into Byrkjelo, a little village with a nice campground. We decided 67 miles of these roads were enough for today.

    And then the sun came out!

    We picked the wrong time to make our way to Voss: the week of the annual Extreme Sport Festival. We got the last spot in the campground, which is perfectly located for a visit to this town: in a park on the lake, only three blocks from the city center. But even empty it would have been a tight fit for us, as the spaces are short and close together. This week, every speck of grass had a tent on it and every tent came with a car with a kayak or some other piece of equipment attached. Some neighbors moved a car so David had a better shot at backing into our space. The place was full of young athletes and their friends. A huge festival stage and tent had been erected about a block away, so we knew we were in for a late night since the party started at 9:30 pm. But . . . location, location, location: any other campsite was miles away and all the parking spots in town were taken.  

    The weather was perfect, so we got our bikes out, found the Folk School that our son-in-law had attended some years ago, and then took the cable car to the top of the mountain. From there we watched paragliders running down the mountain and hurtling themselves into space. The view from the top was beautiful on this clear, sunny day, and in the evening a sky-diving show brought a crowd to the park.

                                    (Paraglider at 11 o'clock; festival tent above cable car; campground above tent.)

    We survived the late night with the help of earplugs. Then we headed for Bergen, eager (!) to see what new driving adventure the day would bring. We had taken a good look at the map and decided against (what one map said was) a yellow road with scores of tunnels and instead chose (what another map said was) a red road that took a slightly longer route.

    The GPS disagreed. “Make a U-turn,” it said. Usually when it tells us this, it adapts to reality after a few miles, mutters “Oh, all right,” and sulkily maps out the course we had decided on. This time, though, was different: after 5 miles of travel, the device was still insisting that we turn around...and then 10 miles.15….Worse, after those first 15 miles, we took a right turn and the road  got really narrow and winding. David put up with this for 7 miles, meeting way too much traffic. “U-turn,” insisted the GPS; and “I told you so, but would you listen?” We finally conceded, turned around and made our way back through the 7 miles, including coming to a complete standstill once while a truck scraped by as we scraped our awning support on the stone ledge on the right. We made it back to Voss and went the other way--the GPS sniggering quietly to itself, but making sure we heard--on a road with a yellow line down the middle and through many tunnels. 

    (Truth be told, we don’t actually listen to the GPS; we muted its annoying voice years ago. But its screen still prints its messages to us, and “U-turn” is one it’s particularly fond of.)

    The GPS brought us to an ugly camping place in Bergen, right on the water in an industrial area. Small and medium sized motorhomes are packed in here, and the place is full. Its sole virtue is that it is a very easy 30-minute walk over the bridge to the old city center. And since we bought the Bergen Card today, it will be a five minute bus ride to the city center for us. Location, location, location.

    (We do wonder just a little what horrors awaited us on that road we abandoned.)

    We moved on to Stavanger, a relatively easy 109 miles on the E39. But this main road ends too at the water’s edge. We had two ferry rides.  Because this is a main road the ferries are very frequent: we had to wait about 15 minutes for one and drove right on to the second. When we were still a mile from the boat landing, we knew the ferry had just come in because car after car after motorhome after big truck kept coming toward us on the highway. 

    These ferries were just as fast and efficient as the ones before--and at a similar cost ($91 for one, $86 for the other). But we pay the price because there is simply no way to get down the west coast of Norway without using ferries.

    Our campground in Stavanger was located close to the city center on a small lake. We easily biked into the city twice. The campground is a sloping field with quite a few trees and very few electrical posts, each one with half a dozen outlets. There were no clearly defined spots for RVs--people just parked anywhere they wanted--so when we told the woman in the office that we would like electricity, she told us to go see if any outlets were free. It was very different from a British campground, where every “pitch” would be laid out with geometrical precision and the office would assign campers to particular slots.

    We did find some free electrical outlets, but it was difficult to find a place to park without being right on top of someone else (which is frowned upon). We parked just off a paved path and strung out our electrical cable a long, long way. It has rained several times since we arrived, and some of the campground has turned into a swamp, reducing the available parking places. We are amazed at the number of RVers who continue to come in late at night.  We like to arrive plenty early to increase out chances of finding a spot open. (Also, we’re not on a tight schedule, so we can afford to quit driving early if we want to.)

  We really enjoyed Stavanger. The central city, smaller than Bergen, is easily walkable. We toured five different museums, among them a surprisingly interesting cannery museum. Canning sardines played a big role in the growth of this city. Today, though, it is the new oil industry. So we also toured the oil museum, detailing Norway’s newfound wealth in the North Sea.  All of this history has occurred since l969. Both museums were very well done.

    We also attended a wedding at the cathedral, completely by accident of timing. There were 21 people in the pews, and it was obvious that some of the others were also tourists. A beautiful bride in a lovely white gown and practically nobody there--it was kind of sad. 

     Like many other Norwegian towns, this one burned down somewhere in its past. The old warehouses on the wharf that have survived are now restaurants and museums.

And one old section of  historic small white wooden houses, some with lovely little gardens, still stands above the harbor.  A young man was washing his little house and Susan had the nerve to ask him what a house like his might be worth--maybe 20’ x 20’ story and a half--and he said over $500,000. “Many people like to live here,” he said. It was a truly quaint street, like a movie set: not big enough for cars.

    Like every other city we’ve been to in Norway, Stavanger’s businesses, except for restaurants, closed up at 4 pm, in spite of the fact that the streets were still full of tourists. And on Sunday, only the restaurants and some of the museums were open.

    We walked the streets and visited shops and--the high point--we bought coffee from a real coffee shop. Our Starbucks had ran out long ago, and we had been unable to find good coffee at grocery stores. So when we came upon this shop, we asked for a dark roast, ground for a french press, and indicated the size of bag we wanted.  When we got back to Rover, we figured out we had just paid about $25 for a pound of coffee.

    We roughly added up our expenses for the month of June and found we are spending money at quite an alarming rate, compared to our trips in previous years. Campgrounds are regularly $45 and up by the time pay extra for electricity and showers and usually wifi, and if we eat out we are spending $70 or $80. We don’t do McDonalds--which are here, along with Burger King--but we don’t eat at the most expensive places, either. Our costs are mainly food, campgrounds, gas and museums, so it’s kind of hard to find a place to cut back. 

    The last few days seem to be repeating themselves. Each new town we visit along Norway’s south coast has an old section of little wooden white houses, an abundance of flowers, busy harbors and ever more beautiful views out to sea.  

    We stumbled into a free overnight parking place in Grimstad, a lovely town  that claims to be the sunniest place in Norway. It certainly lived up to its reputation during our visit. As we approached the town, wondering where we could possibly park, we took a chance by turning at a sign that promised “parking.” Most often this tactic leads only to an impossibly small lot for small cars, but this time it rewarded us with a jettty featuring a “Motorhome Parkering 24 timer max”  sign and space for five RVs. It was a great place to be: right on the water and right in the middle of everything. We enjoyed a visit to the Henrik Ibsen museum, set in the building where he worked for six years as a pharmacist’s apprentice. The original pharmacy still exists with its original equipment.

In the afternoon we stopped for coffee at the Cafe Ibsen across the street from the museum and used their WiFi to watch the Tour de France on our computer. The cafe closed at 4 pm (!) but they let us stay until they locked up, after which one of the waitresses gave us a bag of four large pastries that she said they would otherwise have to throw away. We then moved on to a bar, where for the price of nachos. salsa and orange pop we watched the end of the race on their wide-screen. Free parking, free food, free tv, sunshine . . . what’s not to like about Grimstad?

    The great weather continued the next day, when we visited two more towns--two more neighborhoods of white houses, churches, harbors and market places. In one of them, we first found ourselves in a too tight parking lot too far from the “sentrum”; regrouping (and paying more heed to our GPS), we then made our way to one in the center of town where Rover’s back end hung out over the sea.

    We are starting to see the influx of vacationers of which the guide books warned us. In Risør, many many large saillboats were gathering as part of some tour or another.

We’re also seeing the boosted prices that define high season: a night at a large family camping place, paying $66 for the privilege, and two loads of laundry (including only one use of the dryer) for $20.  

    The roads have gotten busier and also wider as we get closer to Oslo; we even get four lanes occasionally. We drove into Porsgrunn (where Susan successfully read a detour sign in time to notify the GPS) and visited the porcelain outlet. We also hit a second Henrik Ibsen museum--this time the farm where he grew up outside Skien. Norwegians are clearly very proud of their favorite son and do a really good job with these museums. The only thing they don’t do well is signpost to them: often we would see a sign at a traffic circle pointing us in the right direction, but then never see another at any of the next four crucial intersections; worse, the museum would not come up on the GPS. Finally we made our way to another museum in Skien, where the clerk told us how to get there. (The staff at the Ibsen Museum sympathized with us but blamed the local government bureaucracy for not dealing with the signage properly.)

    Part of the Ibsen Museum’s program included a film about his plays which mentioned the Commonweal Theatre in Lanesboro, Minnesota, near where we once lived. But the narrator referred to it as “Lanesboro, Minneapolis.”   Since this error is on film, that’s one correction that won’t get made soon. 

    On Sundays everything (including many churches) is closed except for a few museums. Now headed north towards Oslo, we stopped in Sandefjord to see the whaling fountain and museum. Apart from a huge ferry just leaving for Denmark, the streets, parking lots, and sea were empty. Whaling used to be the economic engine of this town; now it’s ferries and tourists, but not so much of either on Sundays.

    We had seen an advertisement for a Viking Market in Borre National Park.  We couldn’t find it on the GPS or any map, but we did find a little town called Borre, so because we were headed in that general direction anyway, we decided to see what we could find.

    We came upon hundreds of people walking from hundreds of cars towards something of obvious interest. So we drove to the next traffic circle and came back (we’ve grown to appreciate traffic circles just for this reason). While attempting to park, we found we were very close to a crowded campground, so we decided to stay there for the night. Then we joined everyone else walking to the Viking Market.

    This proved to be a Renaissance Faire kind of thing with the emphasis on selling goods, located in a park that included Viking burial mounds and a museum on a hill. There were hundreds of tents--no Coleman tents here: all of them “the real thing”--crowded together under the trees along the fjord. They were selling anything that could possibly be considered Viking: leather goods, jewelry, clothing, yarn, toys, weapons, pottery.

All the vendors and many of the visitors were in costume. People were cooking over fires, and there were a few fun demonstrations going on--all very festive and fun. It took us quite a while to take it all in. And not a single horned helmet or purple football jersey anywhere. We were glad to be close by in the campground when the whole thing closed down at 6 pm.

    Oslo has been great fun: two days of mostly rain, followed by three days of sunshine. The campground remains a mud pit in places and we are amazed that people aren’t getting stuck as they leave or come in, dozens per day in each direction. We kept an eye out for neighbors leaving, and after the first night were able to plug in on our side of the road. On Sunday we discovered that in our absence, the electricity had stopped coming in, which scared us in light of our past electrical problems. But we think it may merely have gotten wet because it has worked fine after we reset the circuit breaker in the campground’s outlet box. (David was particularly relieved because the problem was on the level of the elementary sort of things he understands and can do something about with confidence.)

    One of the worst things about this campground is the noise from neighbors (probably unavoidable when you’re alongside vacationers whose idea of a good time is to take the dogs along and let the kids run around outside until midnight). One of the best things is the  easy access into the city center. Buses arrive every 15 minutes at a stop at the campground’s front gate, and 10 minutes later we are in the sentrum. We bought Oslo Passes which we thought would cost us $80 each but instead found we qualified for the “senior” (Pensioners) rate of $23 apiece. This gave us free access to transportation (including ferries) and most museums for three days-- a really great deal!  

    Oslo has proved to be better than we’d expected. The first place we visited was the new Opera House, its roof sloping into the fjord and inviting people to walk on it (as they do, in great numbers).

Of course, we also visited many museums, all of them very well done. We have seen Thor Heyerdahl’s actual Kon Tiki from 1947 and Ra II from 1970. We also saw three Viking burial ships more than a thousand years old--not only were the ships and the dead royalty buried, but also the everyday stuff thought to be needed for the afterlife: food, tools, household goods, clothing, sleds, horses! (And not a horned helmet among them.) The ships were huge--100+ feet long.

In another museum we were allowed on Roald Amundsen’s Polarship Fram--the actual ship, enclosed indoors--from his trip to the North Pole in l893-96. It spent three years trapped in ice (by design).

    We also went to a third Henrik Ibsen museum--surely all that anyone, even theatre people, should be expected to visit--this one the apartment where he spent the last 11 years of his life. His study is just as he left it, including the portrait of August Strindberg over the fireplace. (Ibsen said he needed his rival’s “mad eyes” staring down at him to motivate him to write.)  Since he was a wealthy man by then it was quite a well appointed place--just across the street from the Royal Palace. And of course we also visited the Vigeland sculpture garden, along with everyone else in Norway, who was glad to get out into the sunshine after a few days of rain. 

    We were thinking these had been pretty impressive days . . . but then came Sunday. We had saved a few free museums because our three-day Oslo passes had expired, so we first stopped at the Rådhus (city hall), not knowing what to expect. We were absolutely blown away. It is in this building’s great marble hall that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded every year. The place is filled with painted murals that are just captivating. We decided it was the best part of the trip so far. (If you visit, it might be worthwhile to wait until a Sunday, when none of the other meeting rooms, also beautifully muraled, are being used for ordinary political business.)

    Three times we have been able to end our day in the city by finding a sports bar and watching the end of the Tour de France. It’s a great way to relax after being on our feet so much of the day. And that’s when it rained again today--while we were safely inside.

Before Norway slips out of our memory bank entirely--don’t laugh, it’s getting easier and easier for that sort of thing to happen--here’s a tutorial of miscellaneous notations for Americans driving around parts of Europe.

Followed, with your indulgence, by a rant.

1. The first bit of notation is specific to Norway and Sweden (and maybe Finland and Denmark, too, but we haven’t been there yet):

Numbers like these appear on parking signs and shop fronts; occasionally they’re even painted on buildings. They refer to things like a store’s opening hours or, as here, the times of day when you need to feed the parking meter. The first set of numbers refers to Monday through Friday hours; the second, in parentheses, is for Saturday; occasionally you’ll also see a second set of parentheticals for Sunday. (You won’t often see that second set in Norway because just about everything in the country is closed on Sunday.)

2. If you do find a grocery open on Sunday in Norway and make your way to the beer cooler, you may see this:

If the store is not in a high-density-tourist area, the helpful explanatory sign will be missing, leaving only the piece of canvas covering the beer cooler, as if to avoid taunting you with the sight of what you’re not allowed to buy on Sunday.

3. These next two are important, and they can be found all over Europe. They can cause more trouble than you might think, especially for American drivers, who aren’t used to them.

You’ll usually see the first sign (top left) along major highways. It means you are on a “priority” road, i.e., you don’t have to yield to traffic that is intersecting your road; instead, if the intersection is not controlled by a traffic light or a sign of some sort, you can drive through the intersection as if the other vehicles did have a stop sign.

    And, after you’ve been driving in Europe and seen lots of black diagonal slashes on signs, you know that the sign on the bottom right one means you are on a “non-priority” road. Usually, you’ll see it on a highway that formerly had had priority status but has had that status suspended in a built-up area.

    So what’s the big deal about non-priority roads? It’s this: when you’re on a non-priority road  you are required to yield the right-of-way to any traffic entering your road from your righthand side. 

    The point of this practice, I’m told, is to reduce the speed of all traffic in a built-up area by making all drivers, regardless of the nature of the road they’re on, come to a stop when a vehicle approaches from their right (again, intersections controlled by traffic lights or some other signage are an exception).

    One problem with this practice is that the poor driver--usually American--busily trying to cope with city traffic, pedestrians at crosswalks, signage in a foreign language, traffic signals in unfamiliar locations at intersections, etc., now has yet another thing to notice and keep track of: “Now I’m non-priority . . . OK, now I’m priority again . . . [crash] . . . oops, I guess I missed that last non-priority notice. . . .”

    Another problem is that the whole system depends on every driver at an intersection knowing the “priority” status of every other driver’s roadway. If I’m on a non-priority road when I approach an intersection, my success at avoiding a collision may depend on whether I know the “priority” status of the guy approaching the intersection from my left: if (I know) the other road has priority, I yield; if (I know) it does not, I don’t; but (here’s the kicker) if I think I know but I’m wrong, there’s a 50-50 chance I’ll be pulling into the intersection in front of a driver who wasn’t planning to stop.

    Happy motoring.

4. The Rant

    Norway is justifiably proud of Henrik Ibsen. After all, the history books call him “The Father of Modern Theatre” (that should be “European” or “Western” Modern Theatre, but who’s counting).

    And so:

--while he was living abroad for decades, building his international reputation by churning out masterpieces that trashed his native land for its philistinism and provincialism (and weather), his fellow countrymen bore it in silence;

--when toward the end of his life he deigned to return to Norway to live, they showered him with honors;

--when every noon he entered the Grand Cafe in Oslo for his customary midday meal, they rose from their tables and remained standing until he was seated (or so the waiter there assured us when we asked which was his table);

--at his death, they established three museums to him in places he’d lived around the country. (And, maybe most remarkably, they saw to it that the commentaries on his life and works in these museums were exceptionally insightful and the tour guides staffing them extraordinarily knowledgeable about his life and personality.) 

--And, of course, they also erected his statue in front of the National Theatre in Oslo

and bade the artists working there keep his plays alive so that (as they love to point out . . . but modestly, ever so diffidently) he will continue to be the second-most-performed playwright--trailing only Shakespeare. And that, unlike the “Father of Modern Theatre” business, is not only in Europe or the West but throughout the world.

    So then: Truly, Ibsen was a remarkable talent, and Norwegians are rightfully proud of his legacy and should do what they can to keep it alive around the land. Most particularly, they should do so at the country’s flagship dramatic institution, the National Theatre in Oslo (where they erected his statue, remember).

Ahem.

About that National Theatre.

But first, about Oslo:

Oslo is, of couse, the capital city of Norway, and many roads lead to it.

And Norway is one of the many countries in Europe that (virtually) shuts down during the month of July and sends (nearly) everybody off on vacation.

And because Oslo is the capital city and many roads lead to it,

--and because Norwegians are a really patriotic people,

--and also because Oslo is pretty far south (pretty far for Norway, anyhow), so the weather there might be expected to be warmer than most other places in the country . . .

for all these reasons, lots and lots of Norwegians spend at least part of their vacation … in Oslo.

(And lots of other Europeans come there, too, as well as quite a few Americans, because it’s a really lovely city, and because maybe they can learn somthing--you think?--from the people of Norway about things like . . .

oh, I don’t know .  .

things like how to keep their citizens alive longer at less cost 

and how to give science a leading role in establishing policies about their environment 

and how to discourage drunk driving by taking away their licenses at the slightest whiff of alcohol instead of this “.06,” “ .08” crap, 

and how to encourage healthy family life with maternity and paternity leaves at full pay and subsidized early childhood education and don’t get me started. . . .

(But I digress.

Where was I?

Oh, yes.)

So the point is--the points are--

(a) Ibsen continues to be really important to Norwegians and to the country’s cultural identity; 

(b) there are hoardes of Norwegians in Oslo in July; 

(c) Oslo is where the National Theatre, dedicated to the preservation of Ibsen’s works, is; and 

(d) seeing a first-class production of one of a guy’s plays--instead of just reading it, say, or, God help us, being reduced to talking about it in a classroom--seeing a play is a really good way of coming to appreciate the work and how the guy’s mind works.

(Can you see where I’m going here?)

Conclusion: July would be an awfully good time for Norway’s National Theatre to be busy as hell, doing Ibsen plays as well as they can do them. . . .

But they don’t do it!

The National Theatre is closed. 

And not just in July: it’s closed all summer!!

WHAT’S  UP  WITH  THAT?

    We left really early for the ferry to Finland, once again crossing the bridge forbidden by our GPS, and driving less than two miles to the landing. They offered us use of electricity on board, which we gladly accepted: since we had to have the LP tank sealed in the “off” position, not having electricity would mean the refrigerator would be off or running on battery power for the twelve-hour trip. But when we returned to Rover at the end of the voyage, we found that something had tripped the main circuit breaker, and those few battery lights that remained were glowing red. (Surely there’s a moral to this story, but we don’t know enough about electricity to figure out what it is.)

    Susan slept for ten hours of the twelve-hour trip and found a bit of time to look up her intestinal problem on the internet. It was just enough information to get her really worried. With a little help from the Viking Line information desk and a call to the US Embassy in Helsinki, we were instructed how to get to a hospital emergency room in Turku. So within 15 minutes of driving off the ferry, we were sitting in the waiting room, with Rover parked in a perfectly level and mostly free parking lot.

    They did some blood tests, gave her some meds and told her to come back in the morning. So we stayed right in the parking lot overnight, running the engine for a while to bring the batteries back. In the morning they took x-rays and then transfered her by ambulance to a bigger hospital, where she had a CT scan and was admitted with a severe kidney infection. Rover is staying put right in the first hospital’s parking lot. Not at all what we had planned, but all part of the adventure.

    This post has virtually nothing to do with camping in Europe. It is, rather, a brief description of our brief trip to St Petersburg, Russia.

    Leaving Rover and the computer behind in the campground in Helsinki, we took an overnight ferry to St Petersburg. Before leaving the U.S., we had purchased a tour that allows entry into Russia without a visa for a 3-day stay with a firm exit date. It didn’t offer a way through customs, though, so after an interminable wait in that line, we were met by our young guide, Anna, and a driver and given a three-hour car tour of the city. It got us oriented, and we also received good advice about how to get around in the city. So after Anna dropped us off at the hotel in the early afternoon, we immediately headed for the ATM machine in the lobby, took out 1000 Russian rubles . . . and when we got to our room, we figured out we had just gotten the grand sum of $30. So on our way out, we got another 6000 rubles and left for the subway and the central city.

    St. Petersburg is remarkably clean--even the heavily used subway, which had the longest escalators we have ever seen: fully a 2-½ minute trip from top to bottom. Many of the buildings are beautifully decorated, and the bright colors of their facades surprised us. But up close, most look to be in need of plaster repair and a fresh coat of paint. Every one has several large downspouts painted to match the building.  Susan finally stopped and measured one: 8-½ inches diameter.

    The main shopping street, Nevsky Prospect, is 8 lanes wide with few opportunities to cross, and is fronted by opulent buildings. Once we left Nevsky Prospect, though, we often could hardly tell whether we were passing by shops or not: there were few big display windows, lots of closed doors, and no markings to distinguish them from private entrances. Purely through stubbornness, we did find a theatre museum--it started on the third floor of the building--with four old ladies who made sure that we saw the whole thing . . . leading us from room to room, turning lights on and off as we entered and left, and seeing to it that we operated the wind and rain and thunder machines. The many scene design models ranged from antiquity to the high point of Russian theatre in the 1920s. But nothing was translated from Russian. In fact, outside of the hotel, we found very few clerks or wait staff who spoke any English.

    We also visited three Orthodox churches: one where all the Tzars are buried, another with mosaics that rival Ravenna, Italy, a third filled with icons . . . and all of them over the top with gold leaf.

                                          The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (!) marks the site of Tzar Alexander II's assassination.

To bring us back to earth, that evening we ate really bad fish and chips at the hotel and watched the Olympics.

    The next morning Anna and a different driver took us on a tour of the Hermitage.  What used to be an opulent winter palace for the Tzars is now a (still opulent) art museum.

Anna knew her way around, knew--and loved--Russian history, and knew what we wanted to see. Because we’d bought tickets ahead of time, we could avoid standing in line, and we skipped whole floors and wings of things we weren’t interested in (“Do you want to stay here after our time together is over?” she asked. “How much haven’t we seen?” we replied. “About 99%,” she said, smirking just a bit).

    The Hermitage is an impressive place, but after four hours on our feet--accompanied by considerable Marxist aesthetics from Anna--we were ready for lunch. Anna recommended a restaurant we never would have discovered on our own: once again, there was nothing outside or on the door to indicate to an American that it was a restaurant, but it proved to be popular place with the locals: meat pies, fish pies, vegetable pies, and of course, dessert fruit pies. We had a delicious lunch for $17.75, including dessert and coffee.

    And then we were on our own. Anna had assured us that the pickpocket and thug stories we’d read about were exaggerations, but we remained careful and alert anyway, and came away without incident. Later that afternoon, we took a boat tour in English that she had suggested.  St. Petersburg is built on islands, in the midst of one major river and many small canals. The sky darkened as we waited for the boat, and within minutes of boarding a  downpour drove us all inside. It rained off and on for the whole hour of the tour. Once again we had barely avoided getting soaked.

    On Sunday morning we got out of the historical city center and went to a huge market in an older part of town. It went on for blocks and blocks: about a quarter of it in newer sheds, selling new goods, and the rest on tables and plastic sheets spread on the ground. Susan bought a child’s plastic sewing machine and considered it a find at $3.

    We then walked and walked, unsuccessfully seeking two other museums/shops the Lonely Planet guide had mentioned, and finally returned to the hotel to get our luggage and be picked up by a third driver, who took us to the ferry.

    Both overnight ferry crossings were smooth. It takes an hour just to get out of the huge harbor at St Petersburg and into open water. A large part of the ship is devoted to partying, with bars and casino and duty-free shopping staying open all night. We had dinner and fell exhausted into bed.

    We arrived back in Helsinki at 8 a.m., and after another long wait through customs got back to Rover in the campground by 10. She was waiting just as we had left her: refrigerator running, and all the appropriate monitors glowing green. Best of all, Susan’s stomach has stopped complaining every times she feeds it. It feels good to be “home” again.

    It was David’s turn to feel sick: in his case, just really, really tired. So Susan drove out of Helsinki and all the way to Turku campground while David slept. Before we left the Helsinki campground, we filled the fresh water tank and dumped the black and gray water. This was the first time in 14 days that we had dumped--a record for us. But then Susan had been in the hospital for four of those days, and our St Petersburg trip kept us away for four nights. Still, we knew we were pushing our luck and decided to be careful lest we have to unplug and level again.  

    After sleeping for about 20 hours straight, David felt better again and we drove into Turku to visit their handicraft museum. This place is about a city block of 250-year-old wooden houses that survived the inevitable fire--this one in 1827--that had destroyed much of the city. The buildings are all in their original place and are now craft workshops and museums of a wide variety. More than half of the buildings were locked up, but it was still an interesting glimpse of what life had been like 250 years ago.

After that, we drove back to the hospital parking lot where we had parked for five nights while Susan was in the hospital. We wanted to be close to the ferry to Stockholm that was scheduled to sail early the next morning.   

    We were one of the last vehicles to be waved onboard the ferry . . . directed alongside a daunting row of 18-wheelers . . . just barely squeezing past . . . almost all the way to the bow of the ship . . . right in line to be one of the first ones off. We opted to shut down the refrigerator for the 12-hour trip rather than plug in to the ship’s generated current and risk some electrical problem like the one we’d had on the journey to Finland. (As it turned out, everything in the refrigerator seemed to survive without any problem.)

    We had opted to pay a little extra for a private cabin (inboard; no window), so we would have a place to rest away from the many passengers who regarded the journey as a fine excuse to party--and the ship line, who encouraged this attitude by hiring Elvis-impersonators to entertain at 3:00 in the afternoon. Nevertheless, we did spend quite a bit of time at a good table right at the prow (but inside, protected from the wind). There is surprisingly little open water between Finland and Sweden, and from our table we could watch the ferry wending through the archipelago of rocky little islands as we left Turku. More than four hours later, we finally left them behind . . . only to soon be amid others like them as we approached Stockholm.

    We were, indeed, one of the first off the ferry, and at the stoplight at the end of the wharf a sign directed us to the E4, so we were quickly on our way to Uppsala, 40 miles to the north. We found the city’s campground and chose a site outside its small Wifi zone rather than park closer to the antenna but next to a noisy group with children racing about and adults clearly planning a big outdoor party (do we sound like kill-joys, or what?). On Sunday we rode our bikes an easy ten minutes into the city, stopping first at the cathedral, where the choir was rehearsing for a service about to start. This cathedral is the largest in all of Scandinavia: red brick, undecorated, with two towers, each as high as the building is long.

     Unlike its plain, unadorned exterior, the cathedral had quite a lot of painted detail inside. We stayed for the first part of the service, but sat way in the back so we could easily sneak out, since we didn’t think we could make it through an hour and a half service--or so it was billed--in Swedish! We went in search of museums, and even on a Sunday were able to find a couple that were open. One was the home and garden of Carl Linnaeus, the biologist responsible for some of the systematic taxonomy we all learned in Biology 101. It was a lovely “fireproof” home that had survived the fire of 1702 that destroyed much of that city. (How many places on this trip have we heard of a fire destroying an entire city? Everywhere we go, it seems.)

    We fell in  love with Uppsala. It is a lovely university town: tree-lined streets and boulevards, tree-lined riverfront,  hundreds of bike racks filled with thousands of bicycles, flowers everywhere, students even more plentiful. It is hard to imagine it on a cold, dark midwinter day.

We stayed an extra night and went into the city again and visited the Carolina Rediviva (university library), where there is a Bible from the 6th century. And then, duly edified, we walked the shopping streets with everyone else.

    We are heading east now, back to Norway. We are in Hallestammer, at our first campground with a swimming pool that is both free and open: 50 meters long, 8 lanes wide, alongside several smaller kiddie pools, all available to the public, but free to campers. We finally got our swim suits wet.

    As we came closer to Norway, the flat farm fields of Sweden changed to rocky wooded hills. Just before reaching the border, we stopped to fill up with gas at the lower Swedish prices. The station was located in a large shopping center where the parking lot was full of cars with Norwegian license plates. We also counted twenty motorhomes there. Everyone was stocking up at the lower prices. We bought just a couple of things at the grocery store, but the guy behind us had eight 2-lb. packages of ground beef.  

    We are now back on Norway’s toll roads. There were no tolls in Sweden or Finland, but in Norway you drive through toll cameras every 20 miles or so. If you are going to travel for several weeks in Norway as we did, it is necessary to set up an account with a credit card: the Norwegian authorities then charge a couple of hundred dollars to the card and subtract the toll from that amount every time we drive past one of their many cameras. If necessary, they load more money into the account. Eventually--well after the end of your travels--they refund what’s left over. We had set up an account before we began driving through Norway at the beginning of this year’s trip; later, we had to set up a second account before our return into the country a second time. As a result, we have no idea how much tolls have cost us, because it will take a while before the Norwegian authorities reimburse our credit card account.

    We stopped for one more day (two nights) in Oslo. The campground was much less busy this time, we had no problem finding an electric hookup . . . and our view of the city wasn't blocked by other campers.

Also, getting to the campground this time, from the south and east, was a whole lot easier than approaching from the west and through the city had been a month ago. But if you are going to spend only one day in Oslo, don’t make it a Monday: anything worth visiting is closed.

    On Tuesday we drove our final lap to Lillehammer.

                                                             At Lillehammer's Olympic ski jump.

Along the way we found two more caravan stores that didn’t have RV antifreeze. We thought we were about to buy a large quantity of the world’s most expensive vodka (taxes on alcohol here being very high). But David read an internet help site on which the answer to winterizing a cabin cruiser’s water system involved “plumber’s antifreeze”; at about the same time, someone suggested we speak to a plumber about how people in Norway winterize water lines in a summer cabin; we did, and were sold 3.5 liters of a concentrated, non-toxic, lightly tinted liquid we are supposed to dilute with a liter of water.

    To celebrate, we then spent the day giving Rover a much-needed bath and interior cleaning.

    We have travelled 3538 miles, and after we have returned home and added up all our kroner (both Swedish and Norwegian), euros, rubles and dollars, we will post a final blog entry in early September.