our changing plans

Flexibility is the name of the game here, especially when you have your own car! Yesterday we had great plans to stay in a fancy hotel in Balestrand and live it up for one night. We planned to arrive there early enough to enjoy some walks and exercise in this community on the north side of the Sognefjord. Little did we know that this one weekend is the Balestrand jazz festival. Sigh! no rooms in this place...what a surprise in this low time of the tourist season. The setting was magnificent so we had a coffee and cake in a little cafe and pressed on. The drive was the usual spectacular stuff...up and down mountains, clinging to the edges of fjords, beautiful forests.
We stayed in Struyn in a hotel with our own bathroom, and had dinner in a fast food place serving pizza, kebobs, and pasta.
Then today we headed for a ferry ride that was incredible. At 9:30 we got on a car ferry that took us up the Geiranger Fjord, another UNESCO World Heritage Site. There were only 3 cars on the ferry and 6 people...in the summer there would be 60 cars and several hundred people. The weather was cool and cloudy, but the rain held off for the ride. The walls are up to 1000 metres high and punctuated with many foss (waterfalls) cascading down top to bottom. There were remnants of abandoned farms that were inhabited some up until the 1960's. Hard to imagine the life of isolation where you got in and out by boat and had to have your children tethered together so they wouldn't fall off the cliffs. On the patches of fertile soil they grew fruit and raised goats or sheep. Hardly a wealthy existence...most probably headed for the oil fields when Norway offered more options. But the scenery was spectacular..can't even describe the awe one feels in these fjords.
The beautiful mountain drives we wanted to take to leave Geiranger were all closed due to snow so we expected to just take the main road and head for Lillehammer...that was until we read about Alesund in the tourist book. So altered the route and headed north west and here we are in Alesund on the coast....a beautiful town with a tragic past. A fire in 1904 burned the whole place to the ground...so the country rallied round and rebuilt the place in Art Nouveau style by 1907 or so. It is lovely to walk through and such a surprise to find here. We have splurged on a Radisson Hotel and Jurg is watching the Canada Russia game with commentary in Norwegian.
We ate our lunch in a Panorama restaurant overlooking Alesund so dinner was a picnic in Sozon and Rosemarie's room at the Radisson. How we mix it up, eh!
Tomorrow we are going to head for Trondheim our last Norway stop before returning to Sweden. I so hope I can find a nice wool Norwegian sweater for skiing ....