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The highlight of this day was our ride in the cable cars up Mount Ulriken (until the rain started). I like flying Icelandair. Because they fly so far north (over Canada and Greenland) on the way to Iceland, I think they save time going to Europe. Plus, Icelandair is efficient at changing planes at the Keflavik airport, so our layover time in Iceland was only an hour and a half. We reached Bergen less than eleven hours after we took off from Seattle. I wasn't able to sleep much on the plane, but because Norway is nine hours ahead of Seattle it didn't seem like I was awake for a day and half straight. We landed in Bergen without any problems, picked up our rental car from Europcar, and drove into Bergen. It was nice sunny day, so I wore my sunglasses. This was the last time I used my sunglasses for the entire trip - we made the mistake of visiting Norway in August, so if you read the rest of this trip report you are going to hear a lot about clouds and rain. Our first visit was to the Fantoft Stave church. The church was originally built in Fortun in Sogn, a village near inner or eastern end of Sognefjord around the year 1150. In the 19th century the church was threatened by demolition, as were hundreds of other stave churches in Norway. The church was bought by consul Fredrik Georg Gade and saved by moving it in pieces to Fantoft near (now in) Bergen in 1883. Outside the church stands a stone cross from Tjora in Sola. On 6 June 1992, the Fantoft church was destroyed by arson; the first in a string of church burnings. After the fire, re-building was soon begun and was finished in 1997. A stave church is one that is constructed using massive timbers as posts to hold the load bearing walls. At first, stave churches were built by simplying buring the base of the timbers in the ground, but this led to rot. Later designs mounted the timbers on rocks to elevate them away from the soil. The feature I liked best was the fine wood carvings. At Fantoft, there are stylized dragon heads mounted on the roof. We checked into the Bergen Montana Hostel, which is located up on a hill outside the heart of the city. There is a viewpoint outside the hostel which provides an expansive view of Bergen. Nearby the hostel is the Ulriken cable car. We walked over to the cable cars and bought a one way ticket. It was such a nice day that we decided it would be fun to visit the top of Mount Ulriken and then walk back down the hill to the hostel. I should mention at this point that Bergen is the rainest city in all of Europe, it averages 90 inches of rain per year. I will also comment that it was a blue sky day with sun, and that I was still wearing my sunglasses. We took a cable car to the top of Mount Ulriken and got some nice views looking down onto Bergen. Almost immediately, dark threatening clouds started forming all around us, and it started to rain lightly. I hoped it would quickly blow over, there were no clouds of the city of Bergen itself, so it didn't look like much of storm. From the top of the cable car, there is a network of trails that leads out over Mount Ulriken, which is treeless expanse of hills and tiny lakes. We walked out to one of the high points. The rain turned into hail. The hail came pounding down, bouncing off of our umbrellas (we were prepared enough for Norway that we brought umbrellas). Oddly, the Norwegian locals ignored the weather - we saw several groups of hiker starting out on the trails despite the conditions, and despite the fact that they wore no ponchos or even coats. I guess when you live in Norway you don't notice when you are getting soaked. The hail stopped, and it seemed like the rain lessened also. We made the mistake of continuing with our plan to hike back down Mount Ulriken to return to the hostel. The rain returned with a vengence. There was lots of thunder and nearby lightning. The trail turned out to be in miserable condition - it was a slippery muddy bog. If they weren't muddy, the steep points of the trail were covered with rain-slick grass. I fell three times trying to get down the hill, and slipped a dozen more times. We were awful messes of mud and water by the time we finally got back to the hostel. Welcome to Norway! It was not an auspicious first day. An hour after we slogged into the hostel, the sun was out again and the puddles were rapidly drying. However, our clothes and packs were thoroughly water-logged. Fortunately, the Bergen Hostel has a washer and a dryer, so we threw everything into the machines and then cooked dinner in the hostel kitchen. The nice thing about the Bergen hostel (called Bergen Montana) is the well equipped kitchen, which provided us with pots, plates and utensils. However, it is a large and popular hostel, so the kitchen was crowded during the peak dinner hour. During our two night stay, we saw an entire busload of tourists stop in, we saw a huge party of backpackers check in, and large contingent of cyclists check out. Also there was a big party of young teenagers who checked in on night. So it is a busy place, but it wasn't noisy. Or maybe I just slept well because we had slept to little on the plane when flying over. We got a room with two single beds and a bathroom in the room. This was our first experience with Norwegian style showers - to save space, there isn't really a separate shower stall. Install, the entire floor of the bathroom is a tiled floor with a drain, which acts as the shower floor. This works okay, except when you are done showering the floor is soaking wet. Do Norwegians always walk around with wet feet? No where in Norway were we provided with a bath mat for drying our feet. Today we drove 32 kilometers. Panorama Photos
MapsThis is the map we had made for ourselves, so that we wouldn't get lost driving from the airport to the Bergen Hostel. Unfortunately, we missed the turn off of E39 and ended up driving into the Bergen city center (and paying the NOK$25 toll). 
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Click on any thumbnail to begin the slide show at that photograph Bergen Photos
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