June 24
Geiranger
When last we left you we were wending our way back down the hill to the village of Geiranger. Once there, we had lunch and prepared for an afternoon bus tour . . .
[Geiranger Church (Geiranger kyrkje) is a parish church of the Church of Norway in Stranda Municipality. It is located in the village of Geiranger, and the end of the famous Geirangerfjorden. The white, wooden church was built in a octagonal style in 1842 by the architect Hans Klipe. The church seats about 165 people (Wikipedia).]
[And its adjacent cemetery . . . ]
[I can best describe this as pleasingly pleasant . . . ]
[And a photo op of the Super at a bend in the road . . . ]
[Hi! Isn’t this cool?]
[Our destination is in sight. The number of tourists who arrived in those buses far exceeds the population of the village . . . ]
[Looking back up, there’s not a lot of flat grazing ground around here . . . ]
[Back to Cafe Ole for lunch – the local brown ale and a sandwich . . . ]
[Quite tasty . . . ]
[Waiting for our tour . . . ]
[There were lots of people leading to some confusion, of course, as to where one should be standing . . . ]
[Eventually were we off on the Eagles Bend Overlook & Panoramic Tour . . . ]
[Driving up through 11 breathtaking hairpin turns . . . ]
[Where we are, Eagle Bend Overlook . . . ]
[Where we were . . . ]
[Quite the view – notice the little runabout at the bottom of the picture?]
[As the boats come and go, the Seven Sisters just around the bend . . . ]
[The overlook . . . ]
[The overlook views . . . ]
[Little teenie boats . . . ]
[And the classic tourist shot of the tourist shot . . . ]
[One wonders just how this can handle a million tourists a year?]
[But I can certainly understand why a million tourists would want to come here . . . ]
[The Super checks to make sure our ship is still there . . . ]
[Ladies and gentemen, allow me to present the wonders of Geiranger . . . ]
[These appear to be Moss Campion, a native wildflower . . . ]
[These appear to be shots through the bus window as we’re heading down . . . ]
[We’re on the way to a higher view behind the village . . . ]
[And now we’re going back up again . . . ]
[Still rising . . . ]
[To the Flydalsjuvet viewpoint . . . ]
[Decent view, I would propose . . . ]
[Bill inched forward for a closer look . . . ]
[Looking at these photos, I was pretty close to the edge . . . ]
[So I don’t understand why the Super kept asking me to back up a couple more steps?]
[The view behind us . . . ]
[The view in front of us . . . ]
[The view of us. We did have a beautiful day here. I noted our guide a couple times in Part 1, but somehow never got a photo of her. She grew up in Geiranger, but the school system only goes to 8th grade. She had to go “over the fjords and through the mountains” to high school – so not close to home. She’s a college student now and tour guides as a summer job . . . ]
[Self explanatory . . . ]
[Then through green Flydal Valley to the high mountain plateau at Djupvatn Lake . . . ]
[All out to see the lake . . . ]
[No, really?]
[Don’cha just love snow and ice in late June?]
[But it was calm and the temperature comfortable – Bill’s in short sleeves . . . ]
[And the Super’s lovin’ it!]
[Oh, and I’m in short sleeves too. Obviously someone outside our group took this . . . ]
[These were storage huts – but I can’t remember if they were for winter feed or winter sand . . . ]
[Your basic isolated farmstead . . . ]
[If you can find a flat piece of land, use it . . . ]
[Back down in Geiranger port, a car ferry . . . ]
[And we begin to leave stunningly beautiful Geiranger behind . . . ]
[Passing the waterfalls we passed coming in in the morning . . . ]
[Passed the Seven Sisters . . . ]
[Then we must eat . . . ]
[In the specialty restaurant, The Chef’s Table, on Deck 1 . . . ]
[On this night, Xiang cuisine – multi-courses with separate wines . . . ]
[We liked it all . . . ]
[And as the sun set we were on our way to Lofoten . . . ]
[Which required a full day at sea before we got there . . . ]
I gained a sense of why Grieg was so touched by the wistful, elegiac folk music of Norway, and what he meant when he said self-effacingly that his music had a ‘taste of cod’ about it. ~
Up Next: The day at sea?
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