Dreams(Fleetwood Mac) - 'A Moose Near the Hoose',Biri to Oppegard,Norway - 13th July 2016

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Being kilometres away from civilisation seemed to have some positive effect on being able to sleep in despite the fact that the sun still rose at a ridiculous and indecent hour of the morning.

The drive down to our next stop just south of Norway’s capital, Oslo, could have been a relatively short drive for us but we have decided to take the scenic route along the length of the Randsfjord.It will be interesting see how this fjord compares to the ones on the west coast as the land here is not nearly as steep.

Just after breakfast as we completing our pack up inside but before we started to take the stuff out to the car a moose walked by the apartment. Earlier we had joked with our daughter that we were so far out in the wild that there would surely be some wild animals around us.

The moose walked past the car and straight through a metre high bush and down the hillside to munch on the green leaves of the trees.

Then we spotted a younger moose walking amongst some tall wild flowers and heading down the hillside to join what we think was its mother.

Although these animals look docile enough we were sort of glad we hadn’t been out there packing the car in case we had scared them or of course they might have scared us!

With the moose gone wandering off into the forest we packed up and headed away from what had been a very comfortable, if short stay. It would have been a great place to spend a night or two more for relaxation had we had the time. However we always knew what we were taking on with Norway was going to mean a whistle stop tour and it was the scenery in between those stops that was the real attraction to come here.

And it was more of that scenery that took us to the D249 that ran west from Biri so that we could join up with the scenic road along the fjord.

We hadn’t got very far and we came across a police car barring our way. We had wondered why it had been so quiet with traffic and here was the reason not that we expected this rural road to be too busy anyway.

A very nice looking young policeman (Gretchen’s words) strolled over to where we had stopped and in almost perfect English told us the road would be closed for a further 30 minutes or so and after he had asked where we were heading for directed us onto the road to our right which would eventually join in again with the D249.He had also asked if we had GPS which sounded rather ominous as the road he was directing us onto wasn’t on the atlas map. His cheerful farewell of ‘good luck’ didn’t diminish our ominous feelings.

However, there were cars coming down that road presumably diverted from the other end of the closure so we guessed it would get us where we wanted to be.

There are so few roads in comparison to a more populated area that we could hardly go too far wrong.

We didn’t find out why the road was closed by a fire engine was coming out of the closed section as we left so perhaps there had been a house fire nearby although we couldn’t see anything from the road we took which went uphill for a short distance and then ran parallel to the road we had been on. It just happened to be further up the hillside.

The surface compared to the D249 was an adventure in itself as the local authority had not spent much money on it for a while and we bounced along over the potholes and the ones that had been repaired all rather uneven.

The road ran through hillside farmland with houses scattered here there but no communities as such until the road descended towards the small town of Dokka which lead us at last onto the scenic road the D245.

The drive was nice enough from the point there was very little traffic so there was plenty of time to view the surroundings.However, the road didn’t run right alongside the fjord as we had hoped and the atlas map appeared to show and for much of the 80 kilometres there was farmland or trees between us and the fjord.

When there was a clear view we did note that the fjord wasn’t like its fellows to the west and had more the appearance of a lake as the hills rose gently from the water’s edge rather than sharply as the ones in the west did.

The weather had started out partly cloudy but as we neared the southern end of the fjord rain started to fall.

This wasn’t stopping the strawberry pickers out in a very large field gathering in the crop. We haven’t had strawberries in Norway even though they have been in plentiful supply as the price compared to what we had paid in France or Germany was so high that eating them wouldn’t have been so satisfying.

Our route to get us around Oslo took us onto the E4 which also had the main rail line north running alongside it.

It wasn’t long before we entered the outskirts of Oslo and we were a bit concerned that the GPS was going to take us through the middle of the city as we started to see office buildings ahead replacing the boring apartment buildings of the suburbs. The western side of the city certainly was just about all apartment buildings for the locals to live.

We have decided that living in the tall blocks would be easier to heat and keep the masses of people warm rather than in individual houses. However many of the apartment buildings had that ‘old Eastern European ‘look even though Norway is not in Eastern Europe! Perhaps it is just the image that apartment buildings convey in our minds.

One thing in its favour was that there were plenty of green spaces in the suburbs and in the part of the inner city that we could see from the highway.

We did go through virtually the middle of the city but the highway had limited on or off ramps and our progress went well until we struck some major repairs in a tunnel that meant our dual laned side of the road and its separate tunnel was closed resulting in the north and south flow having to share the two lanes of the other tunnel.

Our destination of Oppegard was about 15 kilometres south of the city and we were pleased we were heading south as we emerged from the shared tunnel to notice that the north bound traffic which was much heavier than what we were in going south was banked up for about 5 kilometres as we sped on.

We found our Air BnB apartment easily and we had a very warm welcome from our hosts who were both home.

They seemed to be interested in our travels and invited us upstairs for a coffee and delicious ice cream with their fresh raspberries on top. We spent an hour or so chatting before we thought we better get on and leave them to the rest of the day while we went hunting a supermarket for something for dinner.

We had a bit of further action before the day ended!

We hadn’t taken any notice of where the smoke detector was in the apartment and it went off with a very shrill tone as we were cooking up the crumbed chicken pieces for dinner.

Needless to say the tea towel went straight into action fanning the smoke, which didn’t seem that great to be honest, and a mad rush to open the windows either side of the kitchen area.

Our hosts didn’t react so perhaps this has happened before!

The small, hardly double size bed looks to be a challenge to get a good night’s sleep although there is a squab which one of us could take to if it all gets too tight in the night.

PS:todays music title is really all about the lazy,dreamy drive we had.So enjoy on Youtube as usual

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