Boring Stop followed up with Badass Hike

Look, every stop can’t be amazing. Our next port was this little town called Gravdal (Lofoten Islands). Unfortunately, our port day was on a rainy Sunday. Which meant the only thing to do was go to church. Sooo…..we went and saw the church. Wikipedia seems to think this place is the “bee’s knees” with its Cod fishing and mountain climbing but it was rather uninteresting to us uncultured folk. We received another accurate omen to turn back but again did not…..

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So we took a long ass walk in the cold, rainy weather with relatively uninteresting views to a random chocolate shop to eat sweets for lunch. We ended up finding a broken down playground behind the church where the boys swung while we watched locals sit in their house and eat lunch.

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We took our tender back to the boat and were excited for our next day. Little did we know it would be a major ass kicking hike day. We arrived at Andalsnes. Now this place is totally worth a visit. As some of you know, we were part investors in a local climbing company once upon a time. This means we always get a little nerdy when climbing stories come up. Well this place has a massive mountain to climb called Troll Wall. No we didn’t even begin to climb it but we did complete a 708m hike up Mt. Nesaksla.

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It was a bit cloudy at the time we arrived, so I would suggest trying to climb a little later in the day when the weather warms up a bit and helps clear the clouds. I personally love cloudy weather, and it ended up clearing up as we ate lunch! We had a decent lunch at Eggen which is at the top of the mountain we hiked, next to the gondola (Romsdalen Gondola). The boys were exhausted from our “mile high” climb, so we decided to splurge on the gondola for the trip down.

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As if the massive hike wasn’t enough, we found a rock climbing museum (Norsk Tindesenter) and had to go! The museum was pretty interesting as it showed all the different types of climbing gear used throughout time in Norway and around the world. Fun fact: Troll Wall inspired some British climbers to invent the climbing harness we all use today.

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The boys rocked it! We ended up heading back to the boat for some dinner and bedtime. We were sure to have a great night sleep after all of this hiking. Instead, as part of our history lessons, we decided to start Braveheart at 11:30 pm. This was a poor choice as we ended up finishing the movie. As you all know, after such a heavy movie, one must watch a comedy, so we ended up staying up as a family until around 4 am, creating some self-imposed jetlag.