From Røros, our drive is now taking us through Trøndelag municipality which is known in Norway as moustache country. This is because the male stereotype here is of someone with a mullet, moustache, cap, driving an old Volvo and living in the middle of nowhere.
The landscape here is a tad more rugged than at Hamar, but there are still little farms nesting up in the forest clad mountains. There’s not much flat farm land here! We did spot some unusual Norwegian farm animals...ostriches! Norway is not part of the EU and farmers are especially opposed to the union. One of the farms we passed had the slogan Nei Til Union (No To Union) written on the wall.
After passing Trondheim, Norway’s third largest city and the capital city back in the Viking age, we stopped for a coffee at a cafe with a view over the Trondheimsfjord where killer whales sometimes come visiting. However, we did not having any stopping whilst we were there. Maybe they don’t like Englishmen!
Back on the road we passed Norway’s best looking and most important mountain according to Morten; Mortensfjellet (Morten’s mountain), but we think he might be a little biased. Further on we came to fjættenfjorden where during WW2 the German battleship Tirpitz (Bismark’s sister ship) lay in hiding from the Allies. It was eventually sunk bottom up and Berit’s father, like many older Norwegians, would always raise his glass and say Tirpitz instead of skål (cheers) meaning bottoms up.
Trøndelag is also home to many large forests, which means plenty of roaming elk and Andy who had now taken over the driving duties was very happy not to have encountered any. Elks get up to 2 metres and if you hit one you’re likely to break its legs and have it falling through your windscreen. Salmon fishing is also very popular in this area.
By now it was raining again and we saw a huge flash of lighting just outside the car as we were driving along. Thor must have been in a mood since there were plenty of thunder and other flashes further away. We managed to avoid Hell, but drove through Verdalen which must be Norway’s luckiest valley, all the National Lottery millionaires seem to come from here.
Berit took the tour guide role from the back seat and were reading out loud from the guide book about the places we were passing. We tried taking pictures out of the car window with varying degrees of success. Berit tried to get one of a church but ended up with one of a man on a motorbike. The rest of us are wondering if the church really was the intended motif.
We took a little side road to Stiklestad, one of the most important areas in Norway’s history. It was here that the religious king Olav Haraldson, a former Viking warrior, was defeated by the Odin worshipping heathens and killed. A year later his grave in Nidarosdomen cathedral in Trondheim was opened and it was discovered that his hair and nails had grown. When the news spread the pagans were persuaded that maybe Olav had been right about Christianity being the way forward and that’s how the Viking age in Norway ended and Norway became Christian. Olav got cannonised and is now known as Olav the Holy. There’s now a church on the place where Olav died.
One story concerning Olav tells of how he stayed the night at a farm and when he woke up he found the family praying over a pickled horse penis, as they did back then. Never foregoing an opportunity to convert his pagan people, Olav, forever the missionary, threw the penis to the dog and set about telling them about Jesus.
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