Pie

We had a quiet, rainy day today.

It started out at the Hardangervidda Nature Center near where we are staying.

This center is devoted to the animals and flora of the Hardanger Plateau.

The museum begins in a small IMAX theatre where you watch a 20-minute movie complete with scenes of local beauty shot from a helicopter. Because of the IMAX quality, there are those wonderful stomach-dropping moments as the camera sweeps you over a waterfall and into a deep crevasse.

The rest of the exhibit was small and very sweet, consisting of many dead, stuffed animals like arctic foxes, reindeer, and lemmings all artfully posed on cotton-ball-snow with patches of glue still visible. It must have been made in 1950.

After that, we went to the tiny town of Steinsto and the Steinsto Fruit Farm. Though only about 34 miles from Eidfjord, it took us over an hour and one ferry ride to get there.

It is just impossible to get anywhere quickly here. This may be why everyone walks so much; it winds up being faster.

The farm stand was a little house which held a small café on one side and a small shop on the other selling apples, pears, plums, jellies, and their famous apple pies. This farm has the reputation for making the best apple pies in the region, so we went to the café to sample a slice.

It was indeed very good, somewhere between a cake and a pie, and we ate while looking at the rain falling over the gorgeous scenery. We also bought a pie to bring home.

Today was a significant day not only because we ate pie, but also because I had my first driving lesson in a manual car. Well, technically my second lesson since Steve did give me one lesson in Charlotte in his Honda S2000, but I stalled repeatedly and the lesson ended in tears, so I’m not sure it counted.

I got the tears out of the way this time right at the beginning; don’t ask why I cry, I just do. It’s part of the anxiety thing.

Anyway, I managed to pull away in first gear, drive around the parking lot, and come to a stop several times. I only stalled once when I stopped because I thought the clutch was all the way in but it wasn’t.

Here is the strangest part: I felt like I had completely forgotten how to drive. It makes no sense because everything else is the same, you’re just adding the clutch and gear stick, but somehow it threw everything out of whack.

I was driving around the parking lot in first gear shouting “what do I do? What do I do?”

There was just something about adding the new elements that made everything else feel like new, too. I think part of it was that all of a sudden, my left leg was having to do something. Normally it just hangs out there against the seat, the door, the little foot-rest thingy.

It naps, it has a snack, maybe a smoke. It doesn’t get involved. But suddenly, it was having to do something. It was having to not only do something, but it was having to do something independent of the right leg, but it had to coordinate with my right leg and hand. Suddenly, everybody was getting involved.

When it came time to stop, I jammed the clutch in, which would have been fine, but my right leg and left leg felt that they needed to be doing the same thing, so when the left foot pushed in quickly, so did the right foot. So we had quite a few very sudden stops.

And while all of that right leg, left leg, right arm craziness was going on, my brain was saying” steering….what the hell is steering?” It really did feel like starting from square one.

Tomorrow we’ll see if I can make it into second gear.

Wish me luck.