PART ONE A good night’s sleep and a peek through our basement window shows the sun is shining out there which means we can do the hike to Pulpit Rock which should make my birthday a memorable day. We probably won’t get to our apartment in Bergen until after 9pm tonight but then we have daylight until 10.30pm so the chance of not being able to find the place in the dark is unlikely. First though it is breakfast and then load the car up. The final check of the rain radar that put us off yesterday shows that there is no rain heading towards the coast as happened yesterday. Being Sunday we had expected the roads to be deserted and that was the way it was. Heading south initially we passed a road sign that ... read more

We had a solid sleep despite the fact that the bed was an old fashioned double the type of which we haven’t slept together in for years. This is the only shortfall this apartment has. The washing in the bathroom with the under floor heating working dried nicely overnight. The same can’t be said for the weather outside as there is steady rain falling and the forecast looks like it will be wet for most of our drive to Stavanger. Loading the car up wasn’t pleasant with the rain falling and a flight of outdoor wooden steps to go and forth from the apartment to the car. We had two options to get to Stavanger, the E39, the main highway or an option we hadn’t previously considered until we took a closer look at the atlas ... read more

It has dawned not a bad sort of day in Northern Germany after a little drizzle overnight. It isn’t all dash across Germany and Denmark for us and although we haven’t got anything of historical importance to go off and take a look at, we have decided to take a bit of a detour off the A7 north this morning to mix up the scenery a bit. Our atlas has the D199 which travels east of Budelsdorf and then around the coast and back to the middle of this long finger of land to Flensburg the last German town before the border with Denmark marked as a scenic road. So we will give it a try and see what it has to offer other then the flat views of yesterday. There didn’t seem much difference in ... read more

It was another delayed breakfast this morning and we let Wim and Diny get through their bathroom routines before we got ourselves up. We didn’t have to get our own breakfast this morning as they had coffee and croissant with ham, cheese and apricot jam ready for us. We were certainly in relax mode here and before we knew it the time was approaching midday and we had an electric fondue to buy and post back to NZ. Diny knew the best place to buy one and they got the bikes out as the shop, Media Market, was located in the shopping area downtown just a couple of kilometres away. Gretchen was a bit unsteady at first as it has been 3 years (the last time we were here) since we had last ridden a bicycle. ... read more

It was another night of trucks rumbling occasionally through the village going who knows where. Our hosts are very apologetic of the trucks but of course there is nothing they can do about it and we didn’t know that they would be a problem because of a road closure when we booked the apartment. Apart from that the apartment has been very comfortable and has had everything we needed to make our stay comfortable. Gretchen has ‘redesigned’ the apartment since we have been here. Certainly the bathroom is huge compared to say the kitchen which is a ‘skinny’ galley affair and there seems a lot of waste space in the bathroom that could have been better utilised. No time for sleeping in today as we have a lengthy journey ahead of us which will be made ... read more