Day 5 - Bergen, Noway

09/14/2009

This day was mine and Ruth's birthday! And it turned out to be quite an adventurous one!

The day before, we had purchased tickets for a bus/boat/train tour through the fjords called Norway in a Nutshell. We made breakfast in our apartment and then headed for the train station. Unfortunately, we hadn't realized how far the train station actually was from our apartment and we ended up leaving much later than we should have. This resulted in us making a mad run, a mile or so over cobbled streets, to catch our train. John pushed the stroller with William holding on for dear life (he loved it!) -- I truly don't know how that little stroller made it all that way on those streets but I suspect that it was actually flying most of the time. We were hauling. With just 3 minutes to spare we made it onto the train with only one casualty -- William's little fox blanket must have flown out at some point. I was, and am, still pretty heart-broken over it. Losing that blanket also caused a chain reaction of other, nearly disastrous, events later on in our trip.

But anyway, we made it onto the train and started our beautiful day of Norwegian scenery. The train took us to the town of Voss where we got on a bus. The bus took us up and down steep, incredible mountain roads where we saw waterfalls, lakes, little villages and the most breathtaking scenery I've ever seen in my life -- so far.

The bus dropped us off in Gudvangen where we then got on a boat for the fjord cruise. The views of the fjord were insane. Amazingly beautiful. It was pretty chilly outside so William and I stayed inside while John, Ruth and Eric spend most of the time on the top deck. Will took a nap at one point and I had a great time watching the lovely view by myself -- it was a really wonderful experience.

The boat ride from Gudvangen to Flåm was about two hours long. Once in Flåm we did some souvenir shopping and had lunch before getting on the train that would take us back to Bergen. The train ride was just as beautiful, or more, than the fjord cruise had been and we got to go through lots of tunnels which thrilled William.

When we finally arrived back in Bergen it was dinner time and we went to a pretty restaurant that had been converted from a bank -- thus the name Banco Rotto. There were very pretty chandeliers and we were the only people in the entire restaurant. After a tasty dinner we stopped by Deli de Luca for some birthday dessert and spent the rest of the evening at our apartment.