Leaving the Hammer

We left Lillehammer on Monday, the day after visiting the wonderful Maihaugen, otherwise known as the Norwegian Folk Museum. I confess to not exactly understanding why it is called a folk museum, unless it’s kind of their way of saying “Hey, this museum, it’s about Norwegian folk!”

So-called folk museums I have visited in the past seemed to contain a lot of raggedy furniture, and freaky straw-stuffed dolls with no eyes.

This museum was not like that at all, however, it was more like a visit to Plymouth Plantation or Sturbridge village, one of those “living” museums, where the whole shebang is outdoors, and you walk along wooded trails by ponds and fields through a collection of houses and villages., complete with farm animals and actor-villagers in costume who pretend they’ve never heard of a television before.

In the Norway version, the houses were either from the 1700’s or early 1900’s. I confess to being a total geek and loving these kinds of museums, though I know it’s just because they feel like a movie set.

You can often pick up a few interesting tidbits along the way, like what Norwegian flatbread is made of (potato flakes and sour milk), and that is sucks to be a milkmaid. I say this because on the rather warm day we visited her at this museum, she was stuck in a very small, very hot stone room, wearing far too many layers of clothes plus bonnet, and churning butter with movements so vigorous they made my arms burn just watching. I suppose for her, if she does that churning on a daily basis, her arms are probably used to it, and I bet she’s one hell of an arm wrestler, don’t let the bonnet fool you.

Anyway, we left Lillehammer on Monday, and after 45 minutes in the car realized that we had left our passports in the hotel safe, so we turned around and went back for them, thereby turning a four-and-a-half hour day of driving into a six-hour one.

The drive however, was amazing, as the scenery just seemed to get exponentially more spectacular the further we went toward the Western Fjords. The surroundings went from Vermont on steroids, to Maui meets “Lord of the Rings” on steroids, and the scale of it is just not to be believed. I have included some pictures, but photos just don’t seem able to capture the scale of the place.

I will say that Norway seems to be home to some truly terrifying tunnels. On the drive here, we went through two of them in pretty rapid succession, and by the end of the last one both Steve and I were breathing into paper bags. Since Steve is normally a pretty unflappable guy, I realized that these tunnels really must be as scary as I thought they were.

I have never been particularly nervous in tunnels before, but something about these was just freaky. For starters, they are really dark and narrow, with only dim yellow lights above at rather sparse intervals. There were no lines on the road, so it was really hard to tell how close to the sides of the tunnel the car actually was. This was really scary when massive trucks and tour buses would come barreling towards us out of the pitch darkness.

The other freaky thing was that the walls of the tunnels weren't covered with any sort of concrete, so there was just the jagged, dark wet rock shining out at you. It even smelled dank in there. Never before had I been so aware of the fact that I was driving through a mountain. It really felt like being in the belly of the beast.

Both of the tunnels we went through were about 4km long, which was just too long for my liking. Apparently there is one that is 15 miles long somewhere around here.

I guarantee to get me through that I will need some serious sedatives. Or for the milkmaid to bash me over the head with her churn-handle.