Wanderings and Ramblings : Geiranger, Norway--another day of hiking in port

Sailing into Geiranger, we had another lovely morning of fjord views.

I love this shot, because you can really get a feel for how close we were to land on BOTH sides of the ship as we sailed into the fjord.

This time we were a bit later, with an estimated arrival of 12:30. We decided to stay away from the crowds, and enjoy a view with lunch, so we booked Izumi, the specialty restaurant in the very top of the ship. Marika, David and Joachim filled up on sushi while I had some tempura and we all enjoyed the views. This is what it looked like through the window our table was next to:

By the time we finished lunch, we were dropping anchor and the floating dock was being brought out to the ship. It was a very cool contraption that made disembarking so easy, while seemingly causing minimal environmental impact:

It was windy and quite cold, so we threw on some layers, some sunscreen (because it was sunny in spite of the temps) and took some water bottles and headed off to explore.

Geiranger is building an elevated path, along the river, up to the Norwegian Fjord Center, but it was still under construction and closed off, so we had to walk along the shoulder of the road. We were impressed by how careful all the cars were--we never felt in danger. At the bend in the road, we opted to scramble up the dirt path to this little church:

It is a very steep little path, with many loose rocks, and it would almost certainly be safer to stick to the road. I did not realize when I snapped this photo, but as we climbed found out that red jacket was on an EMT and he was helping the man from the cabin next to us, who had slipped and hurt his knee. We had an empty cabin next door the rest of the trip and learned later our poor neighbor spent a week in the hospital before being able to return home! Luckily, our party made it up undamaged and the church was cute:

Just a bit further up the road was the Center. Dave, Marika and I went in to check it out (and use their restrooms) before hiking, and Joachim, being in better shape, headed off to start up the mountain and try to get in two trails. I worried about him hiking alone and was very happy later in the day to run into him hiking with the ship's trombone player, who had also been on his own.

There wasn't much to the Center. There is a small museum, which we did not go in as it seemed over priced for it's size. We liked this area at the tip (the whole place is shaped like a spearhead) as a nice place to sit and look out:

Just across the road and river from the center are the trail heads for all the local hiking.

We started up the trail, which is really pretty, and easy to navigate, but also steep (we went up over 500 vertical meters--see that trail sign pointing straight up? Yeah, there is a reason for that!). With the trees to block the wind and all that exercise, we peeled off layers pretty quickly! There are some shots here with Marika's new coat though.

When you climb high enough, you break out of the trees and into an area with sweeping views:

After one last steep section, across that field, you reach a gate and cross through grazing sheep and goats:

On the other end, up top, you have reached the ridge and a choice of where to hike:

This is where we ran into Joachim and the trombone player. They were returning from the fjord view area and heading the other way to also see the waterfall (you can hike right to it and even walk behind it). We headed out to the fjord view along the nice flat, wide, almost road like path:

and it was pretty awesome:

We probably had enough time to have doubled back and gone to the waterfall as well, but the sky was completely clouded over and it looked like a heavy rain could come in, so we decided on the safer idea of getting off the mountain at that point. Joachim did make t to the falls, and I will post some of his photos of them in a separate post for those of you who are interested.

Back down the mountain, we hung out for a bit n the very pleasant pier area, lingering until the rain actually began to leave this little bit of paradise: