Is this Fjord-real??

July 15th & 16th, 2016

We spent the next couple days in exploring the other areas around us. With the fjords and mountains it takes a long time to get anywhere, so we drove out a bit to explore. We headed to the Stegastein Overlook near Aurland first. The drive here included some incredibly steep roads and hairpin turns on a one lane road with traffic coming both ways. It made for quite the terrifying ride! Either way we made it up to the incredible view. Not surprisingly, there were a ton of people, but the view was well worth it! From here we could see para glider from the next contain over, kayakers below us, and quite a few bike riders actually making the trek up the mountain by bike!

The overlook itself is actually pretty cool, and the end was made of glass so you can see right through to the fjord below. It is easy to loose perspective of how high up the mountains are around the fjord until you locate something below and realize the distance, the kayakers looked like ants.

We made our way back down the same terrifying road (Chuck doesn’t want to talk about it, but he definitely hit a guard rail and scratched the car…(Chuck here, it was either that or hit the car coming the other way, and I don't like admitting to this before returning the car tomorrow!)) At the bottom we were in the town of Aurland, a cute small town where we were able to find a picnic table for lunch. We visited the Aurland shoe factory and learned about the history of the shoe industry here and how they created the penny loafer style shoes. We got to stop into the factory and watch leather being made into various goods.

We had also heard that there are tons of goat farms where you can get fresh goat cheese and made it our mission to find one. The first one we found was apparently not open, so we wandered around the farm looking for anyone selling this cheese. Unfortunately, it was pretty isolated and nobody was there. After driving more dirt roads and steep inclines, we found 2 more goat farms throughout the day, but nobody at any of them to sell us goat cheese.

In Flam, we were surprised at how small the town is. It was smaller than Aurland and Sogndal (the town closest to where we are staying) and is entirely a tourist town. This it where the Flam railway come and all the cruise ships. It is tiny and was packed. We walked through a bit and grabbed a beer at their Aegir Brewery before moving on.

We drove to the town of Underal, which is incredibly small. It has a population of about 100 people and 500 goats. Of course, this is one of the places we tried to find goat cheese. The visitor center, was just an empty room with a map of the town. We found the Underal Stave Church, which is the smallest stave church in operation (seating 40 people) in all of Scandinavia and was built around 1147.

Our next step was to Myrdal, where one of the largest waterfalls is located, the Kjosfossen. It is located right off the Flam railroad and is one of the most visited waterfalls in Norway. Since we were driving we began our drive and instantly began to wonder if this was a good idea. The road up was so small and disheveled that at one point we stopped by a construction site to ask a worker if we were even allowed on the road. His response was a shrug and something about how other people have done it, so it must be. It was terrifying. There were also tons of hikers and bike riders to avoid hitting the entire way and we saw only a few other cars the entire time. We even passed a bridge that we had to get out of the car to open and close the gate for with a note that they don’t want their goats escaping. We are definitely out in the country now! We finally hit a dead end and could see the waterfall up ahead. We realized if we wanted to see the rest of it we would need to hike another half hour and decided we were not up for that challenge. But, not he way back we still found some other incredible waterfalls that were pretty enough for us to enjoy with less of a hike.

July 16th, 2016

Our second day in the Sognefjord area was pretty rainy, so we were glad we got to enjoy the weather yesterday! We headed to the Sogn Folk Museum. It is an open-air museum (which we are realizing Scandinavians really like) and includes over 30 buildings from between the middle ages until now. It was crazy to see how the homes evolveing and imagine people living in these homes during the harsh winters here. There was also a farm where the pigs and horse were very eager to us to feed them. Anna was not keen to get too close to these animals.

Between rainfalls we also made it to the Kaupanger Stave Church, which unlike the one in Underdog is the largest in the area. From the outside it is also quite small, so that’s saying something.

We’ve realized that every small community has it’s own stave church, so we guess they don’t have to be too large. They know this church was built sometime between 1130 (when the previous church burned down) and 1184 when they have record that someone wanted to burn it down again.