It was cold today.
Not surprising, really. It seems that the weather forecasters here manage to get it right, although I guess that “it’s going to be cold tomorrow” is a fairly safe bet. Whether it also rains, snows, or is blue skies remains to be seen, but it will be cold.
When we got up this morning, my watch suggested that it was “1 degree, but feels like -1”. That’s a little hard to comprehend when you are tucked in, safe and warm, in your hotel room.
With heated bathroom floors!
Breakfast was included with our stay here at the Zander K. It was an unusual breakfast buffet, clearly trying to cater to all of the nationalities staying here.
I would have been happy with a bowl of Just Right, with some fruit and yoghurt … just like at home, but that wasn’t an option, unfortunately.
But they did have a hot breakfast option, and it’s been a while since I loaded up on bacon, eggs, and teeny-tiny baked potatoes for breakfast.
Fortunately they also had croissants. Not as good as the ones we got in Paris, but croissants anyway.
And having croissants for breakfast again is important, because I’m going for gold!
Plain crioissants, chocolate croissants … all sorts.
After breakfast, we put on all of our warm gear and considered our options to get from the Zander K to Bradbenken 1. Google Maps once again saved the day and gave us 2 options – walk 250m, catch a bus for about 700m (one stop), then get off and walk another 450m, or just walk the whole 1.4km, which is exactly what we did.
Everything here is so picturesque; quaint little buildings, brightly painted houses, narrow cobblestone streets. I said to MBW that I felt like I had found myself in Wonderland.
We got to our starting point about 15 minutes before kick-off and met our guide (whose name I can’t possibly pronounce), and 2 other guests on the tour – a couple from Oregon USA. The final guest arrived soon after, and she was from California.
USA 3, Australia 2, Norway 1.
Not a great deal to say about the walking tour except that it was intresting and infomative, and took us places that we would never have found ourselves, and likely would never have found our way back out of either.
But the photos below will probably give you an idea of where we went and what we saw. Bergen is very pretty place where it normally rains for 250 days of the year, but we were blessed with blue skies today.
Narrow streets, lots of climbing steps, and narrow, cobblestone streets. When I say “street” I use the term loosly, because they are so narrow that if a car was parked on one of these streets, nobody else would be able to get through. And that would be a serious issue if an emergency vehicle needed to get through.
In fact, they all have to drag their wheelie bins out some distance, because there is no room for a garbage truck on most residential streets where we walked.
The tour lasted about 2 hours, and we were shown some good places to come back and explore further.
After the tour, we went to a hotdog place and had a reindeer hotdog, then hiked to the bottom of the funicular and rode to the top of the hill and back.
We then found a coffee/chocolate shop and had a hot beverage. Cappuccino for me, and a hot chocolate for MBW with a “brown cheese and caramel cookie” to share. Brown cheese … it’s a thing here and we had to try it.
The money here is NOK – Norwegian Kroner (which they seem to pronouce “Crown”, but I could be mistaken). You walk around with 100 Kroner notes which are worth about AUD$15 … so you find yourself doing the calculation all of the time.
That coffee, hot chocolate, and cookie cost us about NOK170, which is … not something that I really want to think about đ
We bought some postcards for the grandkids and posted them, and by then we were chilled to the core, so we headed back to the hotel for a rest and to warm up in our heated room with a heated bathroom floor.
Dinner was another salad from the place around the corner. And coffee … of course.
We are heading off on the Norway in a Nutshell (NiaN) tour tomorrow, stopping overnight in FlÄm (pronounced Flom). All reports are that FlÄm will be much colder than Bergen, and Bergen was cold.
The NiaN trip is taken by train, bus, ferry, train and train again, and should be a great couple of days, ending in Oslo.
We have arranged for a porter service to collect our suitcases and (hopefully) deliver them to our accomodation in Oslo for when we arrive there on Wednesday night. So we have got out the stuff we need for the next 2 days and packed it into our backpacks, and taken our suitcases down to reception ready for collection in the morning.
And that’s about it. Another 16,500 steps today, so hopefully I am won’t come back twice the size I was when we left home.
Ciao
#Europe2025
Finally worked out how to get your blogs Geoff so this is the first weâve read Looks like you are doing heaps of walking which is good for balancing all those yummy pastries
Looks so cold! Least coffee warms you up! Enjoy!