Right off of the Cour St Andre on the Left Bank is a courtyard that I love to visit.

There are interesting shutters and vines growing.

Sometimes wysteria is blooming but this time hollyhocks were.

Wouldn’t you love to stand on this balcony with a drink in hand?

We signed papers for a place on the beach. It’s in a little town south of la Rochelle called Chatelaillon Plage. We really like the town and the fact that we will be right on the beach makes it even better.

See that space between the two buildings? That’s where the building will be that will hold 16 apartments, ours along with them. It won’t be finished until sometime next summer and when we looked at the plot there was a hole being dug but work had stopped. There probably won’t be much work done in July and August either. It’s hard to wait but I think it will be worth it. So we sat through yet another meeting with the notaire where every point is covered, signed and initialed many papers and we now have to pick out tile and floors. It seems like we just did that.

There are hollyhocks blooming everywhere right now.

Of course we had moules et frites-so good.

When the tide goes out, it goes waaaay out leaving all sorts of sea creatures behind to be taken. This sign was showing what could be taken and what size they had to be. I guess some day I’ll be out there with a shovel and pail looking for clams.

It’s hard to believe at the violence that happened in Norway a week after we got home. Somehow it seems worse to me that it was one of their own who did all of the bombing and killing and that, at the bottom of it all, seemed to be anti-immigrant feelings, especially anti Muslim. What is shocking to me is that I have been told that some people in France agree with what this fanatic did. Can you believe that?
So with a heavy heart I’ll go ahead and post the last blog on our trip to Norway.

We finally made it to Trondheim where Britt-Arhild lives. What a lovely city it is, next to the ocean with a river winding through it, full of modern interesting shops. This is a bridge near the cathedral that I think must have once been a drawbridge.

The cathedral-I posted this photo because of the light shining on it. It was beautiful inside, though very dark. It’s the largest cathedral in Norway. As is the case with many cathedrals started centuries ago, it has many different areas built at different times.

Also near the cathedral is this old section of the city built up on the river. I liked walking around this area.

After our visit to Trondheim, we headed back down towards Oslo. On our way, we stopped in the old mining town of Røros (I had to copy and paste to get that line through the o). It’s a Unesco Heritage Site and was really nice to visit.

There was a pretty church there freshly painted inside in light blue.

This was where the pastor’s family sat. I don’t know if they closed the curtains or not. There were curtains where the poor and outcasts sat and I bet the curtains were closed so the wealthy church members didn’t have to look at them.

They mined copper here and some of the old homes of the miners remained with sod roofs. The sod was used to keep the birch bark in place to make it waterproof. It was probably good for preventing fires. I saw quite a few sod roofs around Norway. I think it has now become a “green” thing to do.

A big slag heap which is what is left of stone when the copper has been extracted.

A closeup of the sod roof.

We headed back to Oslo and spent the night and then took an overnight ferry to Germany, thus avoiding driving though Denmark.The boat was like a cruise boat, sort of a cross between Las Vegas and Disneyland, with live entertainment, shopping and many place to eat. By then we were getting tired of driving so it was great to save on some driving time. We spent the night in the outskirts of Cologne, Germany and by the next day were back in Paris. We really enjoyed our trip and just loved Norway. Someday we may return, maybe in the winter, so we can see those famous northern lights.

After reaching the end of the very large fjord, the Sognefjorden, we were in a small place that seemed to have been built recently for the ferries and the train leaving called Flam.

I had been expecting a charming town but there were just a few places to eat and some souvenir shops and a couple of hotels. We came very close to staying here overnight and I’m so glad we changed our plans.

The train stopped at this thunderous waterfall. A video of it is below.

The train stopped for five minutes at these waterfalls and music was played and some magical “fairies” in red came out behind a ruin. It was really cold and wet by the falls and I thought they must have been freezing.

The next day we went through what is called Fjaerland, the home of many glaciers. We even passed Europe’s largest ice cap at one point. After we got over the mountain we started descending and stopped at our hotel which turned out to have the best view ever:

This was from our room on the third floor. There was no elevator and the rooms were rather basic but, oh my, who cared with that view? We were in Geiranger right above the fjord.

The next morning I peeked through the curtains and saw this cruise ship coming into port. Look at that smooth water with the wake behind the boat. It was fabulous.

The next day we made a two hour detour to Alesund full of art deco buildings but I don’t think they compared to what I have seen in Paris.

The buildings were art deco in that they had plants on them, most of them painted.

The ferries were so efficient in Norway. We would come to a port wondering how long the wait would be and rarely had to wait more than five minutes, and usually arriving just as the ferry did.

Not horribly exciting but a look at boarding and leaving a ferry in Norway with the car. It was a wonderful experience, a break from driving and a chance to eat something. I became addicted to their hot dogs which you could top with a crunchy onion mixture. I saw these all over Norway.

We saw so much in Norway and it’s hard to know just what to post about. I have a ton of photos and it’s so nice to have some people who want to look at them so I’m just going to keep going until I run out of material. On our way north to fjord country (even though we’d already seen one), we stopped at a little place called Skudeneshavn, called a “perfectly preserved village”. It was another charming village on the water and there wasn’t a weed or piece of trash to be seen and every building was freshly painted and usually had lovely flowers in pots in front of them.

Hard to beat a yellow flower in front of a white picket fence.

A little bridge over part of the harbor.

If I read Norwegian I could tell what the weather was going to be.

I just loved this view from a hill.

Up in a little park was this rock. They called it the Moon Rock. It looks a bit like the moon but it was thought to be a meteor that fell from the sky for years until a study was done by a geologist who said it was a rock like those found in Northern Norway and was probably bought down by ice. It was about 100,000 years old. I love stuff like this.

Next was Bergen, the gate to fjord country. It was a great city with fantastic architecture. It was the first time we ran into a lot of tourists. Norway isn’t packed with people like you would see in New York City or Paris. Most of the highways are just two lanes as there isn’t an enormous amount of traffic to be handled. It reminded me of my childhood being in the car with my parents going through each town as you drove along, not driving mindlessly along on giant freeways bypassing so many interesting things. There were, of course, times when you were stuck behind a truck or tractor but for the most part traffic flowed.

A look at the old section of Bergen made of wood as are most buildings in Norway, even the palace in Trondheim.

The view from the harbor as we left on a ferry.

Sogneffjord. While beautiful, it just wasn’t as dramatic as our first one. No smooth water or high cliffs, just green mountains. The boat moved much more quickly than our first one moving at such a fast clip that it was almost impossible to stand outside to take photos with feeling like you were in a wind tunnel. Even so, it took 5 1/2 hours to reach our destination.

We stopped several times at various places to pick up or let off passengers but I was really surprised when they stopped along side another boat to let passengers get on it to explore another area of the fiord.

Here are the two boats side by side.

We were in a village in Norway called Arendal and were asked to the home of the father in law of Britt-Arnhild, my blogging friend. It was in a fairly large place along the southern coast of Norway but for some reason our GPS sent us to another so we ended up being 1 1/2 hours late for lunch. It was nice to have a home cooked meal after so long on the road. Her father in law, 88 years of age, made it all. He also exercises and could do more that we could-so much for my exercise program, not that I’ve done any since we left Paris.

Britt-Arnhild and her very nice husband, Terje-which isn’t pronounced how you think if you speak no Norwegian, a language of which I didn’t understand one word.

The 88 year old. He gardened, cooked, worked out, made his own drinks and bottled berries. An amazing man. He didn’t speak any English but he was very good at making you understand him anyway. An incredible fact to me: he has never had alcohol in his life. What a great liver he must have.

We next headed to Stavanger. Because we stayed in a hotel outside of the city, we never visited it. It was one of those very tall towers-21 stories-and packed with busloads of tourists mostly from Russia. We also did something very stupid while there. We were totally out of underwear and sent some out to be cleaned as they had no laundry facilities there and we didn’t ask the price. Imagine our surprise when we found out that our laundry cost more than our hotel room. Rooky mistake. Anyway, we did a ferry trip out into the beautiful Lysef Fjord.

You run out of adjectives to use to discribe the beauty. It was just fabulous. There were no other boats on the water, the water was so smooth without a ripple. Walls of cliffs went up on each side-it was so tranquil and calm.

Loved the reflections.

At the very top of this cliff is a square part sticking out on the left called Pulpit Rock. We decided to climb up there later.

This is me after the climb to the top. A sign at the bottom said it was a two hour climb which I assumed meant one hour each way. Then I saw a “you are here” sign and realized that after one hour of climbing we were only half way there. After an hour I didn’t want to stop even though I was exhausted so somehow I made it. It was very much uphill and what made it so hard were the huge rocks and boulders I had to climb. They were hard to come down on too and on the way down I fell, bloodied my knew, put a hole in my jeans and, to add insult to injury, kept sort of rolling and stopped when I sat in a muddy puddle of water. My knees hurt for three days afterward. But I made it. What a view we had.

Maurice. Notice his totally wet shirt-it was a hot and humid day-and the guy jumping behind him. A lot of young people were having their photos taken this way. I couldn’t have jumped if my life had depended on it.

A look at Pulpit Rock from the side.

Everywhere we went in the countryside we saw these piles of rocks on top of boulders. I guess it sort of says, “I was here”. In this area, scraped clean by glaciers over hundreds of years, and leaving behind boulders, there were an unusually large amount of those piles.