Driving, yeah!

Four days on the road last week, a couple nights sleeping in the car, salami sandwiches and apples, 700 photographs, 3 churches, 1 Viking village, 2 Fehn museums, 5 ferryboats, and 1 Medieval farm. It was a good trip. I began by driving across the south to visit the Viking village at Avaldsnes. The village is a couple fjords north of Stavanger on an island, and I had wanted to visit it when I was there before, but I had no way to get there. So I skipped it. But, seeing as I had a car and decided I should see it. I was 8 hours to getting there. I stopped at 2 stave churches.
Roldal


Heddal

I arrived at 9pm. The sun was setting. The light was lush. This is the cathedral at the site.


I walked around a little, but couldn’t get to the actual village. I ate and then found a place to sleep. It’s tricky sleeping in the car. You want some place semi public, someplace where you wont be noticed but you also wont be broken into. It would be a hassle to wake up to someone’s arm coming through the window. You want someplace that is lit, but not some the light comes into the car. You want to avoid parking lots of retail outlets before they are closed to avoid suspicion of nefarious intent. Business parks are nice. The people arriving in the morning serve as a decent alarm clock. That’s just what I found. I had an Opel hatchback this time around. The back seat folded down and there was enough room to stretch out diagonally. With the exception of the seam between the folded down seat and the back digging into my back all night, it wasn’t half bad. I woke at 8, had some breakfast and made my way back to the Viking village.

Long House: the main dwelling of the farm
Viking Temple: This temple was part of the farmstead. Worship was conducted not as a comunity, but as a family.
Boathouse: A collection of farms was responible for building the boathouse and manning the ship in times of trouble. There would have been many of these boathouses along the Viking Kings coastal region.

I spent a couple hours taking photographs, drawings, talking to the people there. In the afternoon I headed north up the coast on my way to Ørsta, which was the true reason for the trip.

In this small, far-flung berg is the most remote of all Sverre Fehn’s buildings, the Ivar Aasen Center. I am only going to get one trip there and this was it. There are few buses there and as the weather turns into cold the roads over the mountains will shut down. So I had to get there this summer to document it. I made it to the small town of Sandane where I slept another night in the car. At four in the morning I woke up and had to pee. I climber out of the car and found a bush and took a leak and then took these photos. The fjord was so calm and the light was this gray.



I climbed back in the car, but couldn’t fall back to sleep. So I read for a couple hours and finally nodded off. I woke after 8. Before I left town I booked a room at the only hotel for that evening. And then I was off.

The Ivar Aasen center was awesome.






Very similar in organization to the Glacier and Aukrust museums. A long circulation spine with exhibitions to either side. This people here were very generous. I told them i was a student to get the discount (Usually fifty percent the adult price) and they offered to take me down stairs and show me the offices. They let me watch a movie in the theater about Ivar Aasen, who traveled around Norway in the 19th century recording dialects, folklore and eventually created Norway’s written language. He was an awesome figure, he declined to go to university because he felt it would separate him from the common folk, but he spoke like 12 languages and wrote poetry and create dictionaries and grammars. He was also a botanist. Brilliant man. He essentially had to walk all over Norway, and he covered a great deal of the place in his life. He was born in Ørsta, thus the museum. Which collects his writings and botanist notebooks and his accoutrements as well as other Norwegian language related items. The have a library, which the librarian was kind enough to walk me through and talk to me about its function and such. I got a lot of photographs of the place. Not many drawings though, time was tight and I had to get back to the hotel.

That night I slept in a really expensive bed, far over priced. I paid more then a hundred dollars and the television was so ancient the remote was as big as Buick. But the shower was nice and the bed was comfortable and it’s a prospect of relativity.

The next day I drove to the Glacier museum, took some more photos, drew some more sketches, talked my way into the offices here, so it was worth it.

Again, the Glacier Museum.

Two of the actual glaciers. If you ever get here, there is a film about the glaciers in the museum that runs on the half hour that is spectacular. There are also hiking tours of the glaciers and helicopter tours.

Then I drove home. I made a stop at a this farm:

Farm house
Pump house
Interior of a stable.

The whole trip was more then 2000km of road. All told, it was a fruitful trip. I’ve been back a couple days. I wrote another entry for Tun, and decompressed. Now I’m planning a couple more adventures before leaving for the continent in September. I’m going to try to get to Bergen for a couple of days and then try to see another Fehn building south of here. Which should, in my mind, be easy to get to, but there are no busses or ferries or trains that go there from here. It’s like 20km away. So it’s this whole complicated changing conveyances to get there.

Here are some various photos from the road. I tried to stop and take shots of various places.
This was in the high country.



The Fjords in this region are the most beautiful color green.

This is a slug I found.

I find myself drawn to the way sheep position themselves in fields.

Also, the school started up today. i most likely wont be taking a class this fall. But I’ll contact some people and try to see if I can get into any of Fehn’s houses. Maybe try to meet the man himself. Check in with some of the professors and run my ideas by them, see if they have any insights. The travel may be winding down, but the work is just beginning.