Don't let a little rain get in the way!

We spent some time doing inside things and shopping in the downtown area of Bergen. One of our stops was the Hanseatic Museum. The balance is stacked with dried codfish from northern Norway. Their protein was in high demand in the middle ages so traders in Bergen made good money exporting and bartering for other goods.

These are the same window spaces (can't vouch for the glass) that traders peered out of onto the same rainy streets back to the year 1705. This building survived all of the fires and weather back to that date.



Please do not touch the old ledger books. The Hanseatic League traders lived and worked in this room.

This looks like a compfy little crib - if you were short enough and didn't have too much stuff that you needed to keep with you.

I loved walking the old uneven floors and ducking in and out of the oddly cut up rooms.

A few doors down this rotted floor is being excavated as part of a rebuilding project for one of the buildings that was about to fall down.

Some days are like this - just ask a four or five year old.

Next morning, very early, we headed north for Sogne Fjord. It was still a little rainy but that is one of the major moods of Norway so you just have to go with it. We caught the ferry at Gudvangen for a two hour plus trip to Kaupanger.

Good news: very few of us on board. Bad news: cool and rainy.

Nærøy Fjord is very narrow and over 600 meters deep.

We chugged our way toward the main part of Sogne Fjord passing several little settlements. This one was at the end of the road on the western side.

This settlement had electricity but no road in or out - still, they had cars for getting around from farm to farm.

 

The trip was very peaceful.

 

Mother and daughter on deck

Nice looking berry farm

The ferry seems pretty big when you are standing on deck but the fjord walls drawf everything.

 

We left Kaupanger and drove to Hella which is one corner of a triangle of ferries. We were headed for a place called Vik i Sogn, where there is a stave church built back in 1140.

Our crossing was quick, from just to the left of the waterfall to this beautiful little villiage.

We parked the Polo right in back of the Hopperstad Stavkirke.

The black color is from the pine pitch that is painted on the entire building every few years. It is the same technology that the vikings used to keep their boats watertight. The roof design in these churches is also boat design - just turned upside down.

Original carvings and door posts except for part of the right post. It was cut off to make room for a rather important townsman who had died and ordered a coffin that was too wide for the door. Someone went home, got an axe, and adjusted the door. In those days (until the 1800's) people were burried under the floor of the church. The floor boards were like boat hatches. You just pulled them up, dug the grave and planted Olav. It is said that the smell inside the church got more unbearable as the graves got shallower. Finally, it was forbidden and everyone was burried in the churchyard. The door post was repaired of course.

this old door in coated with multiple layers of pine sap pitch.

 

It is very dark inside. The windows (see next picture) are dinky. The candles are few. The main alter is the darkest part of the sanctuary. The church is restored to the Catholic era - as close to 1140 original set up as possible.

The little circle symbols all around the room symbolized the fact that the Bishop had blessed this building. The canopy over the altar is a Catholic feature which was torn out of almost all of the other 29 remaining stave churches.

Altar with canopy

Some of the post - Reformation art was left in place to show how the walls were decorated.

The larger windows were added later in the buildnings history. The little portholes are the original windows.

You have to love the dragons.

On our way up the valley we stopped at a little restaurant for a last look at Vik and the Sogne Fjord.

The rest of the trip home was a wild ride on back roads, right next to booming waterfalls and through several unlighted one-lane tunnels.

It was still raining when we got home but our day had been memorable. Erin left early the next morning. It was so good of her to come visit us.