Balestrand

We awoke at the time I set, actually a minute early but I miscalculated and we gave ourselves little time to pack, close down the apartment, bring our suitcases down noon to town, across the harbor and onto the boat. I set the alarm at 715am, our boat left at 8am.

Whoops. It worked out for the most part except we didn't get a good seat on the side of the boat. We moved around a bunch anyways(once I realized it wasn't getting me sick) so it wasn't a huge deal.

We are officially taking several forms of transit to get to Oslo. However, we decided to break up the trip by stopping in a place somewhere along the way called balestrand!!  It is a town along the sonjefjord and is quite charming and spectacular. The car for the hotel greeted us at the dock to pick up our luggage leaving us to admire the views. We went up to a different(read:much fancier) hotel that anchors this town and was able to enjoy lunch on a balcony overlooking the fjord.  Joe had a lobster sandwich and I had a Caesar salad with trout from the waters below!

We got to see the room for a bit including the balcony overlooking the fjord and then went off to get our steps in for the day. The girl who's family owns the place(who normally lives in Marin county california), said it was a well marked trail we were headed to, which was super accurate. However, getting to the trail head proved challenging enough I nearly gave up. Luckily Joe didn't.

We wound up doing a nature trail with little placards that showed us what we were looking at. Since we did such a big hike yesrerday, without meaning tk, we stuck to a flat trail. Afraid that the town would shut down early, we didn't get to even finish the flat trail. We were treated to some fabulous views on the way down.

We went to dinner at one of two places in town(the third, called the pilgrim, was closed today due to "the pilgrimage"), Joe had black cod with risotto and I had some salad and spaghetti. We then had a desert slice!

We came back to the hotel and played cards on the balcony overlooking the fjord. Pretty much we spent the bulk of the day, trying to do activities that allowed us to overlook the fjord. And it was good.