Mom gamely goes along with the rental car idea, but this is unquestionably my portion of the trip. Pointing at a narrow strip of road on the map with national parks on both sides, I tell her, "I don't know what's there but it's SOMETHING."
It was something all right. I should let the photos speak for themselves with minimal narration:
Stick shift car
1.5-lane roads lacking in lane markers
A roundabout IN A TUNNEL
A glacial plateau above the tree line, highlight of the trip, photos taken while driving
Two consecutive woodland cabins, one with direct fjord view, both with electric tea kettle
I climbed that waterfall, by the way. The trip up was rocky and steep and the trip down was...improvised. Inspecting the mossy boulders alongside the falls ("foss" in Norwegian. Also foss in Icelandic since I know that was your next question), I reasoned that it was possible to shimmy and scooch downward on my rear end for, oh, forty meters or so. It was a
pretty efficient route down the slope until I hit a sheer cliff face and remembered why the falls seemed so spectacular and loud from the bottom. One hard right turn into a spongy bed of moss and low evergreen shrubs, and I was safe but quite far from the trail I had taken up. I had no choice but to tromp along through the pine needles for another half an hour, worrying a little about my cavalierly American approach to nature until I rationalized that this was nothing the reindeer didn't do.
Before I ate them.
Yeah, you read that right. Fjord tough.
This is where I stopped scooching.
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