Erling and Astrid Monuments

The cabin was very cozy in the morning, so I delayed checkout to the last minute. That meant I started out hungry. Alas, it would be a couple of hours before I’d roll into a town with a bakery.

In the meantime I went along the coast, and was shocked to see people out in wetsuits. This is a popular surfing spot apparently?

The Eurovelo route got strange for a while, sending me over a very bouncy footbridge. Sometimes I don’t think the people who assembled this route actually rode bicycles along it. They just saw a series of fanciful paths, bridges, and local monuments on a map and stitched them together.

Farther inland I paused for a while to watch a tractor digging furrows, and the masses of seagulls swirling around it, picking bugs and worms out of the turned soil.

A few miles after that I paused for a snack next to some noisy sheep. Always nice to have something to look at when you’re snacking.

Along with living beasties, I had an encounter with an electronic one:

At least it’s smart enough to avoid going in the road, unlike the sheep.

The route returned to the coast, and for a while the uncomfortably cold air was the only thing reminding me I hadn’t been magically transported to Southern California.

Somewhere around here was a ruined and then restored church that was worth a gander… Turns out the Eurovelo runs right next to it. Probably on purpose.

I found a kiosk with some context:

The church itself was very thoughtfully restored. Due to its weird past, it seems a lot of the material just went missing, and the architects opted to replace it with modern materials instead, including large sheets of glass.

Though I was in the area to see the church, the two tall monolith-like structures next to it made me curious.

A nearby kiosk had some interesting background on them:

Neat stuff!

I rode on. My destination was a sizable town named Stavanger, but first I had to pass through a smaller one named Tananger that had a nice bakery in it. Good place to pause for an hour and digest more food.

I bought a mocha, a croissant, and a slice of cake to feed my legs. The cashier talked to me in English, then talked to the next customer in Norwegian, then got on the phone and had a lively conversation with someone in Russian. Meanwhile, a young man at the table next to mine had a long phone conversation in English with a relative – his mother I think – about his job and future. I gathered that he was Canadian, working for an oil company, and his work hours didn’t let him leave the facility often. He didn’t have much of a social life.

“Yeah, I guess this is just like any other place,” he opined, sounding bored. “I dunno. It’s alright. I go to work, go to the grocery store, go to the gym. I can do that anywhere. I mean, I could see more of the country, but there are only two good hikes to do in Norway.”

I realized I didn’t like this kid. To myself I thought: Well is the problem that you don’t know, or that you don’t care?  If you don’t know, you can fix that.  But if you don’t care, you have a real problem…

“Oh yeah they have a good ferry system,” he said. “I could go all the way up the country. But I dunno, long boat rides are scary right now. Did you hear about that cruise ship with the outbreak? Yeah, they say it was rats. People breathing rat turds. I don’t want to deal with that…”

I knew I was overhearing something I shouldn’t. People don’t want their fears being judged by strangers. I finished the croissant and turned on the noise cancellation in my headphones to drown him out. The last thought I had about it was: Wow, people’s ideas of risk can have so much variation. That probably explains a lot of the way the world is…

As I was leaving town, a cluster of teenagers on motorized scooters went blazing down the road past me, then bumped onto the sidewalk, turned around, and went blazing back the other way. The kid in the lead had the fanciest scooter, with large off-road tires. The local James Dean.

On the edge of town, a different bunch of kids came running out of a restaurant and excitedly chased the bike for a dozen yards while I waved at them.  Their parents emerged a bit later carrying to-go food.

I turned west and went over a large hill, then found a bike path that began to slope downward and cut through a lot of suburbs. Pretty soon I was down by the sea again, in the heart of Stavanger.

Stavanger city center is very touristy.  It’s disorienting after cycling through the hinterlands and mostly seeing shy rugged locals.

I checked in and did some sink laundry. Then it was time to find food, and since I was in an urban setting I deployed my FANCY shirt for the first time!

Fish soup was very tasty but not filling.

As I ate, I went through the local ferry schedule on my phone and decided to skip most of the island-hopping part of the Eurovelo 1, because it was a scheduling headache. The ferries arrived late, and the campsites I needed to stay at were on the other side of large hills that would take all day to climb. Not a good combo.

When that meal was done I walked the bike another four blocks and sat down at another restaurant. Bike tour appetite! I got fish and chips but was less interested in the chip than usual, so I boxed them up.

Out the window I saw a guy walking by carrying a huge fluffy cat over one shoulder. A Norwegian Forest Cat perhaps? It was looking around very curiously.

Two old gentlemen next to me had a discussion about Ukraine in Norwegian.  I couldn’t parse much of it, but at one point they drew the nearby waitress in, and asked about her accent. She confessed that she was Ukrainian, and both men went “справа Украине!” She grinned. They talked a bit more but I couldn’t decipher it.

With my fries tucked away, I walked the bike through the rest of the wharf district. Restaurants and pubs were either shutting down or cranking up the music. The architecture was lovely but I felt strangely ill-at-ease. Perhaps it was the press of tourists? The poor signage and the lack of bike accommodations wasn’t helping. Google Maps kept telling me to ride the bike down staircases. How long has that been a problem here? 

I wandered for quite a while, passing a few parks, some statues, the church… After weeks of the very Norwegian countryside, I felt like I was in a place that didn’t have a real personality.

The big old church wasn’t very distinctive. I’d seen a bunch of cities in Norway already with old central churches.  The park area with the fountain was not particularly grand or manicured.  The cobblestone tourist district had the usual boutique shops and pubs, but I’d seen Norway’s version of that before. The tourists walking around in it had that “blatantly rich” style that’s all designer jeans, handbags, interchangeable jewelry, odd-looking hair or skin that’s had a bit too much attention lavished on it — a lift, a lot of tanning, meticulous plucking, et cetera. And they had such dour expressions, like they weren’t even having a good time. Were they wandering around for a few days between legs of a cruise, or did they actually have business here?  No idea. In the rest of Norway, people look up and even smile when they see the weird guy on the bike – even young women – but here, they don’t.  They watch from the corner of their eye instead.

This city doesn’t really feel like Norway.  It feels more like a coastal version of Hamburg. Perhaps it’s the port…