The Queen’s Trail

I wake up at six with the sun. It’s my last day in this part of the country and I want to hit a big hike, return the van, and make my flight to Oslo. The same coworker who recommended Hotel Sundal recommended Dronningstien, the Queen’s Trail, a mega hike about an hour from the campsite, named for Queen Sonja, with the famous steps carved into the mountains by pre-Reformation monks.

I try the road to the Monk Steps first, but it’s closed for timber transfer. Not to be deterred, I go anyway, and end up face to face with a mega oversized load of hundreds of massive tree trunks, tetrised and stuffed onto a trailer, coming downhill and ready to ride over me like a monster truck derby. I reverse and back into a pullout.

After that it’s too much.

So I go to the hike through the normal entrance. They want 200 kroner for the road up the mountain, but the toll is paid through Vipps, which is their payment app, and I don’t have it, so I cannot pay because I never got hard currency. So I just go.

I do the hike for a couple of hours and get to the first viewpoint. You can turn that hike into a nine hour day if you want. I don’t. I have a flight to catch.

Then I go down through one of the longest tunnels I have ever been in. It’s so big it has a roundabout inside it. They built an interchange in a tunnel. Unbelievable.

They have an iSushi here, by the way. Funny. Who ever needed an iPhone for sushi?

I drive along the fjord and it’s so beautiful. It’s literally magical. There’s a stretch of fruit orchards with farm stands selling plums and cherries and apples, and the apples aren’t ripe yet, it’s too early, but they look delicious and it’s always cute to see an orchard.

Then I give the van back and the guy is annoyed that it’s only at sixty five percent charge. I stopped an hour earlier and charged it from twenty to eighty, and at eighty percent charging slows down, so I don’t know how he expected a full charge.

I get a hamburger and fries from a fast food place. $20 for a shitty hamburger. Only in Norway. But I’m so hungry it’s fine.

Bergen is interesting. You can go thirty five minutes out on the metro and it’s still apartments, but you can drive fifteen minutes and be in the middle of nowhere with a lot of land, because it’s on the other side of the mountain, past the tunnel, in a different valley.

I would love to live there, fifteen minutes from the city, in the mountains. I’m sure it’s expensive.

Burger King is a big thing in Norway. I haven’t seen a McDonald’s. A group of kids on the metro all have the paper crowns and they scream at each other.

I much prefer the countryside to the city. The city has too many people and the people make me anxious.

I would rather see four people a day and have to treat them nice, than see a million people a day and not really get the chance to interact with any of them.