Tonight we are in Sarpsborg, Norway. It’s the kind of place you stay when you decide the distance from point A (Flåm, Norway) to point B (Växjö, Sweden) is too far to make in one day of driving. So we split it into two days of about 450 km (280 miles) each. We decided to take a scenic route today and saw some amazing sights.

Like this:

And this:

And this:

As we did on Monday driving to Bergen, we went well above the tree line and saw snow. Plus tons of sheep roaming around. See Smugmug for their photo.

Finally, two photos of the really gigantic ship we saw in Flåm. It was so big (over 1,000 feet long) I could not get a shot of the whole thing up close with the camera we have.

In town:

And leaving for Bergen and beyond:

Mother Nature dwarfs even the largest man-made objects.

Tonight is our last day in Norway. We will have spent one-third of our time here. We really liked Norway a lot. The people are friendly, they all speak great English and the whole country is gluten-free friendly. The scenery is amazing. It took our breath away at every turn. It’s been hard to cull the photos down to just twenty or so.

The people of Norway are ambitious and imaginative. The country is so rugged it really took a special breed of people to tame it. But they did. As you drive around you see the awesome power of water as it flows from the tops of the mountains, into the fjords and out to sea. The Norwegians have harnessed this power building hydro-electric plants everywhere they can and stringing wires over some really inhospitable terrain. In doing so, they created a standard of living that is among the highest in the world.

Their imagination comes across in projects like the spiral tunnel or the Oslo Opera House. Even ordinary road features like bridges, ramps and even signs often show creative flare.

It’s been a great eight days.