Eidfjord, Norway, is a quaint village of 600 people in a small fjord.  And the scenery here is spectacular.  The mountains are so high and steep and there are countless narrow waterfalls running down the length of them.  The fog/clouds are unlike any we’ve ever seen, in long usually horizontal strips across the mountains and constantly moving.  Only one problem – it’s day 2 in Norway and it’s still raining.  Now we know why it’s so green here.

We took an all-day tour excursion to the little town of Flam, one of Norway’s most scenic coastal villages. After a 2-hour bus ride to Flam, we boarded a train and rode another hour before transferring to another train for another hour’s ride and then the 2- hour bus trip back to the ship.  All in all, we climbed from sea level to about 3,000 feet.  We made two stops along the way to get up close and personal with huge waterfalls and another to have lunch at an elegant old tourist hotel.  The scenery along the way was just incredible.  A large variety of beautiful tall trees, but mostly pines, and in one meadow we even saw a moose (yes, Denise, a moose!), something our guide said was very rare since they’re afraid of the trains.  And of course we saw many, many long, long waterfalls.

We passed isolated farms at the bottoms of the mountains.  That’s where people manage their farm operations in the wintertime – the climate is much more temperate near the fjords, never getting much below freezing, and the fjords don’t ever freeze over.  In the summertime, they take the animals up to their summer farms higher in the mountains. The animals we saw, mostly sheep and cows, were at their mountain summer farms. Many residents have summer cabins in the mountains too.  The Norwegians are outdoors people and the cabins, which they visit year round as a base for both summer and winter sports, are very rustic, sometimes not even having water or electricity.

I took about a thousand photos but unfortunately, because of the rain, only a very small portion made it across the cutting room floor.  Two things I never managed to get a photo of. One was the grass roofs on the tops of buildings. Lots of little houses and all of the bus stop shelters had grass roofs on them.  According to our guide, grass roofs are so much better for insulation and keep the houses much warmer.  They do require a bit more maintenance, needing replacement more often than the slate roofs with which many of them have been replaced. If the grass gets too tall, they simply put a goat up there for a few hours and the problem is solved. And the second missing photo is of the small meadows we saw filled with pink and lavender lupines. They are exactly what you’d expect to see in the small roadside and trainside mountain meadows but every photo I took of them is just a pink and lavender blur.

When docking at Eidfjord, we just pulled up to this little dock with the rubber tires attached to it. It was amazing to see a  ship this big parked at a dock that small.  I didn’t even know this was possible.

Building this 4,500-foot suspension bridge across the fjord came with much reluctance on the part of the locals because it eliminated the ferries which were a big part of their way of life.

When going across the suspension bridge, you can see a hole to the tunnel you’ll soon be entering. It’s a little eerie.

Our guide says that Norway is referred to as the land of a thousand tunnels. And some of them are very long. Indeed on our train trip up the mountain we passed through no less than 20 tunnels. Norwegians think car tunnels are safer than the roads that cling to the side of the mountains which can deteriorate and crumble. Two of the tunnels we went through on the bus even had roundabouts in them like this one!

This is an old school house but still used today. Our guide says that Norwegians get 10 years of education before deciding if they want to go on to advanced education: primary school is grades 1-7, and secondary school is grades 8-10.

This is a moss roof which is different from a grass roof. But I think it’s very pretty and I’ll bet it has the same excellent insulation properties.

We took the bus to Flam where they had another one of these elegant old hotels right at the harbor’s edge.

One of the bigger summer farms.

At Flam we caught the train up the mountainside. This long train had 2 bathrooms and one of them was out of order. People got a little…um…restless, shall we say.

In this clearing is one of the summer farms we saw from a distance.

We went from the fjord where our ship landed in Eidfjord to another fjord and eventually to Flam which is actually located on a smooth-as-glass lake. The view of that lake was the most incredible scenery we’ve ever seen. Unfortunately the best views for photos were on the way home when I was sitting on the wrong side of the bus.

This is Tvindefossen, or twin falls, one of the two huge waterfalls we saw. Tvindefossen is just over 500 feet tall.

From up on the mountain, we could see snow on the higher elevations.

The remaining photos are a few mountain shots.