Day 4, pt.1: Stave Church in Hopperstad

Day 4, Fri., June 3.  A sound night's sleep for a change, despite the noisy Indians!  Up at 6:10--no more jet lag!--& down to breakfast at 7:35, just in time to see the last of the raucous Indian contingent, who seemed to be grabbing handfuls of everything they could carry as they exited the breakfast room.  They left the serving tables considerably barer than they'd found them.  Fortunately Charlotte, Unni Marie's daughter who was taking a stint as the breakfast server, replenished everything after they'd gone.  Terribly rude & obnoxious people!

   We'd planned originally to drive to the village of Solvorn & then across to Urnes to tour the Stave Church there. But after I looked at the map carefully, I realized it would be too long a driving day for Rob after yesterday's marathon car trip.  We needed to take a shorter excursion.  The town of Vik had a Stave Church within close proximity, & a jaunt to Vik looked entirely manageable.  So we drove the 4 or 5 miles to Dragsvik & took the ferry from there to Hella, then the same ferry took us to Vangsnes & from there we drove about 10 miles or so to Hopperstad, just on the far side of Vik.

  The church there is small but very old--built in 1140, though refurbishments have been made to it since.  When we arrived with a few other people, the caretaker came out of an adjacent structure that looked like an old house.  It was built of wood with a sod roof that had grass & flowers growing on it.  (See photo below the church.)  He asked us if we wanted to go inside the church & we said yes, so he asked us to pay an admission fee, opened the church for us & answered a few of our questions.

   The room we stepped into was very small & dark.  By the light from the small doorway (that's Rob outside the doorway, looking in), we could see some of the carvings & other woodwork, but there seemed little more we could see inside the church--no altar or other structures within the church.

   We walked around outside a bit & looked at the gravestones, most of which seemed comparatively recent. 

   We started back toward Vik again, thinking it looked very charming & that we were bound to find someplace there to get a bite to eat for lunch.

   Before we arrived back in Vik, we stopped for a few snapshots of the area we'd just visited, as it was so irresistibly picturesque:  a small, very green valley at the foot of steep mountains, with brightly painted wood houses scattered upon knolls covered with gigantic yellow dandelions.