Norway fjord flying: Sogndal to Bergen

We stopped for a breather after the mountains at Sogndal and the stop was a bit of a mission.  The people there were lovely, but....  The card reader would only take Norwegian cards.  (This is quite a large airport)  Then there was a 100 Norwegian kroner charge for paying in foreign currency.  And how could I forget the 25% VAT on the charge.  So all in all we paid €43 for the landing, €15 of which was fees, making this the most expensive airfield of our trip so far (speaking from 3 weeks in the future) and hopefully only to be topped by Rome.

So since we knew how expensive everything gets in Norway we opted to continue down the fjord whilst the weather was good and go in to Bergen.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Light beams

Nice huh, but I still prefer the mountains!

Finally we got to the metropolis that is Bergen, I'd spent some rainy time in the clubhouse in Klanten looking up all the interesting things to see, but of course it was after 8pm by the time we touched down.  Bergen is again a major airport.

Bergen

So we set out to find somewhere to stay.  My prior research had shown that hotels start at around £150 per night for a double.....  So it was time to get out the trailer.  The airport security guy who came to say hello looked somewhat shocked when I came to the conclusion that we would not need our tomahawk that night & pulled it out of our duffel bag and threw it back in the plane.   Luckily Julian talked really quickly about planes to distract him.  We spent the next hour pootling around trying to find somewhere we could pitch our tent out of view.  This was before I discovered that my bicycle Garmin has all sorts of normal GPS features (like find the nearest campground / local museum etc.) so I just scoped a largish area with no driveways marked & headed there.  On the way we found a marginal spot.  Hey sleeping on what felt like a 20 deg slope is worth it when you save that much.  The tough thing was was once I'd prepared the corn, carrots & cabbage for dinner, we discovered that our stove had blown a seal and was definitely not going to be cooking us dinner.  Raw carrots & corn ok, but we baulked at raw cabbage :-(  So we retired with our fly off for reduced visibility (yellow tent not such a good idea under the circumstances).  But Odin or Thor or Loki was smiling upon us and we were given a night without rain (an unusual occurance for Bergen).

Attack sheep, that stared at me & baaed as we put up our tent.

The next morning we packed up and got out of there as quickly as possible.

Ju with a trailer full of camping gear

As always the weather was looking pretty good, but set to get worse.  So goodbye Bryggen, and Stave church, maybe some other time (when we're rich)!  We're back to Denmark.