Cottage Core

There’s a hole in the rock above the road here.

The waterfall I slept next to comes down a cliff, and the road runs along the bottom of it, and back when this was one of the few ways through this side of the country, somebody dug in up there and waited for the Germans to come down it. You can still get into it. It’s a scrape in the stone, maybe big enough for two men lying flat, with a sightline straight down onto the asphalt.

I climb up to it and I sit in it for a while. There’s a memorial nearby and I can’t read it.

It’s a bad position. That’s the thing you notice sitting in it. There’s one way in and one way out, and if the people on the road below you decide to come up, you have nowhere to go but the waterfall. Whoever was in here knew that when they got in.

Then I get back in the car and head for Sundal, stopping at orchards and waterfalls that catch my eye along the way.

Hotel Sundal is the hotel I fought with Tabby about. The expensive cottage core Norwegian dream my co-worker recommended.

It’s a restored bed and breakfast from the 1800s, absolutely gorgeous, with phenomenal water pressure. I check in, change, write in my journal, go to the sauna, and take a very nice shower. Doing my best to relax and enjoy a vacation.

Then it’s time for dinner and I eat it by myself.

I did not intend to get the wine pairing. It’s $110 for three, maybe four glasses of wine.

The food is turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy, basically a Thanksgiving dinner. The appetizer is bread with olive oil, good hearty bread. Dessert is a peach cobbler, and the crust is good, but all the fruit in Norway is sour, because they don’t get enough sun for the sugars to develop, so the peach never got sweet.

The woman who created the hotel used to be an engineer with a city life and she wanted to move to the country, so she restored this old hotel with a government grant and her life savings.

That’s the system. The state is rich, the people aren’t, but if you have a cool idea you can get money. This woman got half a million. The salmon people I’ll see tomorrow got ten million. Almost every genuinely cool thing I have seen in this country exists because somebody got a grant. If you pitch an interesting and exciting vision, the state is happy to financially support realizing that dream.

She gives a speech before each course. About the restoration. About being an engineer. About how all the food comes from the farms nearby.

Everyone paying extra for a story.

I get pretty drunk on the wine pairing and I read the New Yorker for an hour.

There’s a very long article about John Roberts, who spent his entire career building toward a powerful executive branch because he believed in Reagan, and who is now handing that power, fully assembled, to Trump. He built the throne for one man and a different one sat down in it.

And a piece about the crypto company backed by Sam Altman that wanted to verify every human being on earth and gave up on the crypto and kept the verifying, so that they can protect the internet from spam.

While I’m reading, a handsome old couple tries to talk to me. The man is tall with a full head of white hair, almost like Ted Danson. He asks me if I went in the ocean today, because he probably saw me jumping off the dock at the sauna.

And I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t know. I probably seem hostile. I kind of just look at them like, why are you talking to me.

Honestly, I would have talked to them at the beginning of my meal. If he’d started talking to me earlier I would have been down.

That’s the thing about me. Once I stop talking to people it’s very hard to start again.

So I answer, but quietly, and I nod along at the next thing he says. And I don’t ask any follow-up questions.

Then I sit by the fireplace in the greenhouse for a while. Then I go upstairs and call Angelina and get into a cozy comfy bed. Such a cloud of feathers. A relief after my uncomfortable night in the van.