Woke up to bright sunshine on Sunday morning, after a good night’s sleep in the tent amidst occasional showers. It’s always pleasant to have light rain while camping, as long as it’s over by the time you have to pack up!
Before we hit the road, we fueled up (gas and coffee) at the local Circle-K. This convenience store chain seems to have made some serious inroads within Norway, by way of Statoil, the Norwegian oil company. We even were able to pick up a pulled “pork” vegan burrito for later from the deli section. This, in a town of about 5000 people.
We headed further up the valley towards Røros, on old mining town that’s a World Heritage site. On the way we were passed by a few skiers. Completely expected and normal.
We wish we’d had more time to explore that area, because it looked very interesting. There were a few old mines that you could tour and a lot of good MTB cycling/hiking in the area as well. Alas, we had to descend back down the valley towards the E6 and Trondheim.
It took all of our willpower to resist the urge to catch a bit of the Sunday afternoon soccer (football) match that the entire town of Ålen must have been attending. But what we couldn’t resist was yet another stop at a waterfall that doubled as a rest area with picnic tables and a small tourist concession. There we ate our burrito along with a N/A beer, and enjoyed taking a handy test to determine if we were ready to continue on our journey.
Every few miles there was another turn-out or viewpoint to enjoy the beautiful valley road. We stopped often, listening to good music and podcasts, enjoying the relaxing drive.
When we arrived in Trondheim, it was just a bit of shenanigans to find our Airbnb for the night. Google Maps did a pretty good job of getting us in the vicinity, but we had to park and do some traditional visual searching to find the exact house. Once located, we were greeted warmly by our hosts and we settled in for a bit. We had the entire basement floor of a house with shower and small kitchenette and two rooms of our own to spread out in.
We couldn’t relax too long, however, because we were meeting up with an old friend of ours who lives 1000km to the North in Senja. Ivar stayed with us for a week, about ten years ago, when he was brought in to do field checking on a new orienteering map in the Northern Kettle Moraine Forest. We kept in touch a bit, but hadn’t seen him since. When we knew that we were heading to Norway, I pinged him and by some amazing coincidence he was also going to be in Trondheim for a family reunion.
Long story short, we shared a wonderful meal with Ivar and his wife Elisa. It was handy to have some native Norwegian-speakers around to negotiate the menu customizations for our particular diets, even if our waitress was Australian.
It’s amazing to think about all the things that had to go perfectly in order for the four of us to meet up like this. We each traveled a long road to be here and enjoy each other’s company. These connections we make are the things we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.
