As I drove through a thick Norwegian fog the other day I thought of the Hollywood image of heaven where people walk on top of clouds. Being in a cloud is the antithesis of my view of heaven where we hang out with people we love who predeceased us.

Being in the cloud is isolating, frightening; you cannot find things that comfort although they might appear and again disappear without your control. Maybe hell is in a cloud, shrouding people from knowing where they are and who or what will appear. Removing control and holding understanding just barely beyond comprehension, leaving us forever striving to comprehend as the wariness presses down.

But for me hell quickly evaporated as I drove into a tunnel where it appears Satan doesn’t spread his disquieting fog.

I always enjoy folk museums, and the Norsk Folkemuseum was extensive with clusters of buildings depicting life in different eras and places.

A highlight was seeing the stave church from Gol. It was very similar to the Borgund stave church we saw a few days ago, but a little bigger and more ornate. In talking to the docent I learned that it was so deteriorated by 1884 when it was moved to Bigdøy, a peninsula owned by the King and adjacent to downtown Oslo, that they only moved the best preserved pieces, primarily the inner structure and staves. The current church is only 1/3 original. In reconstructing the church at Bigdøy, they copied the Borgund church to construct the outer walkway and roof. However the interior is almost entirely original. Inside, the twelve staves are painted with black swirling designs in lime wash and are topped with masks, which they believe represent the apostles. The log walls and ceiling of the semicircular apse where the priest would have been were covered in paintings from 1652. Like the Borgund church, benches for the elderly lined the walls in the nave where the congregation stood, but here the benches had a line routed near the edge, and the indentation was painted black. Similarly, a routed black line ran along the centers of the St. Andrew’s crosses which added strength between the staves. When they moved the church in the 1880s they removed the pulpit and windows which had been added after the reformation, because they wanted to return the church to its original condition. However they left the paintings.

Ornate carvings in the wood surrounding the three doors into the nave depicted interlocking lines reminiscent of Celtic patterns, and also an image of what looked like the Scot’s pagan Green Man. The docent said that the Norsk pre-Christian pantheon included a god like the Celtic Green Man.

Another highlight for me was to see Norwegian homes from the 1700s. They were log houses with a sheltering porch or outer door. We saw barns where the farm animals would have spent the winters, and kitchen gardens where the family would have grown vegetables. We saw store houses where food was saved for the winter. We saw a dairy building where cheese was made and small houses for loggers. We know in the 1700s our ancestors lived in rural Aust-Agder, and at least some were farmers or cotters. These log houses would have been familiar to them.

Itineraries are packed with sites to see, fun and sometimes exciting activities to experience, and interesting modes of travel: hiking, scenic railway, gondola, biking, skiing. In planning a vacation my hours and days are dedicated to learning the possibilities for sites and experiences we can enjoy in this new place. I discover museums, parks, local favorites. I learn about buses, subways, trains, and local driving tips. I reserve hotels and apartments. Plan our driving, train, and bus routes. Each city on our trip gets a custom booklet of sites and experiences which will likely pique the interest of my individual family members.

Traveling with my husband and daughters has always been a wonderful experience with a balance of old buildings, like castle ruins to explore, scenic places, and museums where we all enjoy learning about the culture and history of the place.

Traveling with my mother in Norway has been a new and equally enjoyable experience in travel for me. I still did the pre-trip research and made the individual city booklets, but each day is relaxed and none of the sites on the itinerary have been must-sees. Each day At times I found I needed to reflect about why I felt strongly about visiting a site before I gently let go and no longer regretted missing it. The most important vacation experience is enjoying time with family and sharing new experiences with them.

These four weeks in Norway with my mother have brought a rediscovery that hanging out with family is more valuable than any museum. Together we have visited medieval stave churches, Viking ships, farms, fjords, homes from the 1700s, and snowy mountain tops. We have driven across the snowy top of the world and up the steep sides of a fjord. And we have enjoyed hanging out in our comfortable apartments playing gin rummy and Yatzy. I have crocheted and learned basics of the ancient art of nålbindning. Norwegians knit, but as a beginner who is still learning to make even rows of knits and perls, I chose to bring my well used crochet hook instead. My mom bought me a book on nålbindning at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, and I’m enjoying learning to make a hat. I bought 2-ply red and dark gray yarn which I use together forming a thicker yarn.

We have slept in, talked, and laughed together in our apartments over these four weeks in Norway. So while I didn’t check off every museum and site on the itinerary, I haven’t missed a thing. Hanging out with my Mom has been a pleasure.

Windy roads, forming narrow flat places on the steep mountain sides, snake up the walls of the fjords and cut through the mountains in long tunnels. The tunnels are engineering masterpieces with traffic circles sending traffic to different destinations. The traffic circles were well lit with blue lights and high ceilings.

The longest tunnels we drove through were 11 and 8 kilometers. As we exited the longest tunnel, there was a rest stop for those who wanted to enjoy the daylight again. If you didn’t take the rest stop you plunged immediately back into another tunnel. At another place we exited a tunnel just at the beginning of a beautiful span bridge, and as soon as we left the bridge the road dove into another tunnel.

The walls of the tunnels, except at the entrances, are not strengthened with concrete. The walls are solid rock. In Seattle’s tunneling project concrete will provide structural strength. Norway’s mountains seem to be solid rock.

We stopped at a beautiful waterfall, Tvindefossen in the Hordaland region. The water spills over flat shelves of rock from one tier to the next. We walked to the base where dry land lies between water spilling down on both sides.

Along the route, when we weren’t in a tunnel, we enjoyed seeing sheep, goats, a few cows, a couple horses, farms, houses, rivers, and waterfalls. We had seen similar rural scenery from Bodø to Kristiansand, and it was always beautiful.

Finally we arrived in Aurland, just 8 kilometers before we reach our apartment. We stocked up on groceries and then let the Garmin lead us to our next home. We drove through a pretty residential neighborhood for a couple blocks before the road climbed above the town on an extremely steep single lane road with few passing places. As we climbed the fjord, the land dropped off steeply giving the passenger fabulous views of the fjord below. As the driver, I chose to not enjoy the view until we were safely parked at the top.

After eight or ten switchbacks we had climbed to 800 meters where we came to a scenic overlook with a long broad walk jutting straight out over the valley. The sides were solid but the end wall was glass offering an excellent view of the town and the blue-green water below.

Our apartment was on a farm just a couple kilometers and a small rise beyond the viewpoint. After the viewpoint the road wrapped around to the back side of the mountain where we looked down on a valley between three rounded snowy peaks.

Our farm, Bjorgo Gard, had a small flock — perhaps a dozen — of goats with kids and sheep with lambs. One of the sheep had a cow bell dangling from her neck. Beyond the pasture and barn was a shed holding several more goats. Outside the farmhouse a dormant kitchen garden was partially covered in black plastic waiting for the spring planting. Clusters of bulbs, perhaps tulips, looked just a few weeks away from blooming.

Our apartment was in a second house further up the steep gravel driveway behind the farmhouse. This house had four apartments. Our one bedroom apartment looked up the valley and across the deep ravine to a snow covered mountain. Beyond our house the driveway continued to a few more farms.

Crossing the mountains between Kristiansand and Lofthus, Ullensvang wasn’t what I expected. Once we got high where there was snow next to the road we no longer passed farms, instead we began to see winter cabins. As we climbed, the land became covered with snow with snow covered lakes melting around the edges. It felt like we were on top of the world. Snow and gently rounded peaks in every direction. Every few kilometers revealed a couple vacation homes or occasionally clusters of apartments in small communities or large resorts.

My experiences with mountains has been primarily in the Cascades of Oregon and Washington. I think of roads going up one side, reaching the pass, and descending into the lowlands below. These Norwegian mountains redefine what it can mean to cross a mountain range.

Not wanting to drive on snowy roads in an unfamiliar country, I planned the trip for late May. I was happy to see this highway, bare and dry, stretching across the snowy mountain tops. We drove for hours between the white domed mountain top and through tunnels. Many tunnels were only a few hundred meters long, but a length of one kilometer seemed typical and two of the tunnels were over 4k. Those tunnels were too narrow to have a yellow line down the middle, still, with every truck we passed in the dim light, I grew more comfortable.

After we came down from the snow, the road curved in and out following the contours of the land and often dove through a mountain revealing another of the endless steep valleys below. Once again we passed small farms with sheep and grassy fields. Many of these farms in the Hardangerfjorden region grew fruit trees — apples, pears, cherries, and plums. Many of the trees were clothed in pink or white blossoms. At the tip of Sørfjorden (fjord) we drove through Odda, a beautiful town I’d like to see again.

All along the route the road went from having that welcome yellow center line to not having it, and occasionally narrowing briefly to where you could barely pass a car. A couple times I pulled way over to let a truck pass. But mostly I just needed to pass on the outside of the pavement. Guardrails offered a small comfort when the fjord dropped dramatically next to the road. It’s hard to describe how steep the fjord walls are. Imagine a hillside where the steep roof peaks on the houses next to the road were often just a bit above street level. Their driveways, when they had one, jutted off the road, immediately turned to parallel the road, and dropped steeply to a somewhat level parking place.

Our bed and breakfast stay was in an old house in a tiny village. A torrent next to the house flowed down the fjord walls to the salt water below. Inside the house carved wood decorated door frames and lintels.

When we checked in, they gave us a nicer room than the one we reserved, and we completely enjoyed our stay. We ate dinner in their restaurant, where we were surprised to see most of the menu entrees were Thai dishes. Every large city we’ve visited — Oslo, Trondheim, and Kristiansand — had at least one Thai and one Indian restaurant. The cities also have several international groceries, but most restaurants serve typical Norwegian or European cuisine.

The hotel breakfast, just as we saw at the other hotels, offered a buffet of hard and soft boiled eggs, Brie, Norwegian brown cheese, slices of mild cheeses, prosciutto and other sliced cured meats, smoked salmon, sweet pickled herring, tomato based pickled herring, sardines in oil, sardines in tomato sauce, cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, bread, and jams. And of course, strong Norwegian coffee, a variety of teas, orange juice, apple juice, and milk.

Nancy Samuels