June 14 - Trondheim

We slept well, and were not aware of the rain and hail that fell during the night. The morning was cloudy with some sun, and a cool 10 degrees.

Sherrill contacted another Norwegian friend, Marit, whom she had met in St. John’s. We met Marit at the shopping centre in the Nedre Elvehavn area. We then walked through some narrow cobblestone streets of an old part of the city. And then, it was up the hill to Kristianstenfestning, the old fort that overlooked the city from the southeast.

We walked from there back to the city centre so that we could visit an information centre, and see some of the old buildings and statues there, including one of the King‘s royal residences, Stiftsgarden, the largest wooden palace in Scandinavia which was built between 1774-1778.

Marit invited us back to her apartment for a pleasant lunch and visit until mid-afternoon.

We retraced our steps to Are’s apartment for a late afternoon rest. After last night’s dinner, we decided that home cooking was a good idea, so headed to a nearby grocery story to decide on what to have tonight. And so, here we are comfortably settled into Are’s apartment for one more night before heading further south and west to Kristiansund - Molde, and the western fjords for our last week before returning to Oslo.

As we’ve driven south we’ve seen many signs in Norwegian, some of which we could guess what they meant, while others, we didn’t have a clue. One sign that we had seen frequently around Tromso was ‘gravlund’. We weren’t sure what this meant, but it seemed that every time that we saw such a sign there seemed to be gravel pits nearby, we assumed that it meant ‘gravel pit’. This is not the case. It actually means ‘cemetery’! So just when we thought that we were picking up some interesting Norwegian words … ! The moral of this is, ‘Buy a Norwegian - English dictionary even when you know that most Norwegians speak English really well!’ We bought one today. J