The Day of the Kooks

I want to take a cab to the camper van pickup office.

Lars says no, no, no, you should take the bus. And I don’t listen to myself, I listen to him, and that’s my mistake. I listen to a guy who is a fucking idiot and I knew he was an idiot.

The bus is ten minutes late, so I miss the transfer.

Then no cab will come get me, because I’m fifteen minutes outside the city and cabs are only in the city. There are no cabs in the countryside. Drivers keep accepting the ride and then messaging me to cancel it. Over and over. And then I get one I can’t cancel without a fee, so we just sit there in a standoff.

So I get on a bus to cross the bridge, thinking it will be easier to get a cab on the other side.

And then I get the notification that I’ve left my sack of sin behind.

Everything is still in it. It’s a safe country. People don’t really steal shit here. But I have to get back on the bus, cross the bridge, get my shit, and cross back.

I have left that bag behind so many times. Once or twice all the money has been taken out of it.

So I wait an hour and get on the exact bus I missed in the first place because of the transfer, and then walk twenty minutes.

I could have been there in twenty five minutes. Instead I spend nearly three hours riding buses with people who are nonstop scrolling Instagram. Nobody is talking to anybody. It’s a bunch of teenagers and old people.

Yesterday was the day of the kooks. I talked to two crazy people for twenty four hours straight.

Today I think will be calm.

The van is a Kia PV5, a new generation electric van with a 400+ km range and a thirty minute fast charge. It has so much potential, but this version is not a well built camper. They left the middle seats in underneath the bed, so there’s no storage for clothes. I drop my suitcases in the passenger seat. It’s all the cheapest IKEA furnishings. There are no privacy curtains. It would have been really bad for two people, honestly. There’s nowhere for a second person to put anything.

But it has heat and air conditioning. Plus it’s electric so I can run climate overnight.

I scratch the van within about four minutes. I think it will make a noise if I get too close to the curb and it doesn’t, and I go over the curb and it scratches the plastic underneath. It’s noticeable if someone looks. Please don’t look.

Then I get tired, because I’ve been getting sleepy around 6:30 every night, and I take a nap in a parking lot at the base of two mountains, in a canyon, right at the lake. A parking lot for a grocery store mall with a view you would not believe.

The roads here are exceptional. I have not seen a pothole. Not one.

This is a country that took all of its oil money and put it into the ground. Bridges and tunnels everywhere. Huge cable bridges connecting towns that have almost nobody in them. Bridges to nowhere. And next to a fine road, they’re building a bigger tunnel.

If you’re a nerd for bridges and tunnels, what a great place to visit. I keep thinking of my friends who work in construction.

I read that a $5 billion bridge was going to be seventy five percent of their infrastructure budget. It was part of a $40 billion plan to bridge five different crossings using an untested technology of floating tunnels.

The total Norwegian road budget is about $5 billion, which is thirteen times smaller than the US budget. But per person, Norway spends about $870 while the US spends $190.

The infrastructure expands into the sky. The 5G is perfect. Even in the middle of nowhere, I have great service.

But Lars and Lynn both explained that the state is rich and the people aren’t.

They have a migrant underclass. There are a lot of Ethiopians and Eritreans here. And Norwegians who are working class don’t starve but they are certainly not rich, because the salaries aren’t high and the costs are enormous. Meanwhile rich Norwegians live a different lifestyle and don’t even use the state’s well-funded healthcare system, instead paying privately for doctors.

So the state has all this money and it builds beautiful infrastructure. But people want money to go to a restaurant, and they don’t have that.

It’s been a week since I spoke to Tabby.

I send her a message scheduled to arrive in two weeks, saying that I’m going to make her drink Malört if she keeps this up.

I think we’re done. I guess we broke up in New York, on her last visit, when I asked if she wanted to take a break. We reconciled that same night.

She thinks I’m miserable. I don’t think I’m that miserable. I mean, I definitely can be. But there are a lot of moments that are pleasant.

I think she’s miserable. She complained that she doesn’t have friends and she hates her job. And I complain too. But there are a lot of moments where I’m just chilling and having a good time, and all she saw was misery, and all she felt was misery, and she didn’t like it, and she feels like I choose to be annoyed and grumpy.

And there’s some lesson there. I’ve been trying to focus on not being so annoyed and grumpy, and trying to choose happiness, and trying to let stuff pass by me.

Tabby changed her flights from Norway to Portugal. I imagine she’s going to party a lot and go to clubs and hook up with people and have a lot of fun.

I wish I was more.

I spend an hour this evening deciding between a waterfall and a pub.

I’m at the waterfall and it’s beautiful and I’m thinking about camping there, and then I decide to go into town, because I have to poop and because there’s a pub that closes at ten.

Five minutes from the pub, after a thirty minute drive, I think, honestly, that waterfall would be amazing to wake up to.

I had forgotten that I had to poop.

So I turn around, and heading back to the waterfall I remember, and now I really have to poop, and I can’t find a toilet. I stop at two or three campsite areas and restaurants on the side of the road but they’re closed.

So I poop in the woods.

And then, right after, I find an open toilet at a campsite. With running water. And soap.

I don’t have any wipes, so I use a paper towel, and thankfully it’s a really soft paper towel. Kind of perfect for what I need.

And then I get back to the waterfall and the road to it is closed. The guy clearly doesn’t want anyone there. And there’s a perfect open patch of land for camping on the other side of the gate.

Big time bummer.

So I wasted an hour. I could have had a fish soup and a drink and put myself to bed nicely, and instead I’m thirty minutes less far along than I wanted to be, and it’s night, and I’m going to eat lox for dinner in the dark and my hands are going to smell like fish.

That’s what’s up.

Could have had a very different evening had I just checked the camp spot by the waterfall in the beginning.

But I didn’t.

I cannot sleep at all that night. Tossing and turning in anxiety. I’ve never enjoyed sleeping by the side of a road. Even though I’ve never been a victim and nothing bad has ever happened. Sleeping in a car always felt deeply unsafe. Which makes settling in difficult.

At four in the morning Angelina sends me David Gandelman’s grounded sleep podcast. The gist of it is, don’t worry too hard about whether you’re sleeping well, because worrying about it makes it worse.

It works. And I keep coming back to it for the rest of the trip to get restorative sleep.