Simply Sarah Suzanne

 Friday had us up early to take a ferry ride from Stavanger to Bergen. This was a large ferry - more like a small cruise ship with space for cars below, and people, shops, and cabins above. It took about 5.5 hours to get to Bergen by ferry and we mostly napped and read. When we arrived at our hotel in Bergen, we were very hungry for lunch so we decided just to eat in the hotel’s restaurant since it was quick and easy. After lunch, we took a gondola up to ulriken where we got excellent views of the city and surrounding landscape. After taking in our fill of the views, we headed back down the mountain and strolled through town to do some shopping and get a sense of the local atmosphere. The streets were very busy with people - much more so than in Stavanger. This is partly because of the locations and partly because it was now the weekend. When we were getting hungry again, we met up with 4 other members of our group and the six of us went to an Asian restaurant for some dinner....

We arrived in Norway Tuesday night and took a bus from the airport to our hotel. After checking in, we walked across the street to a small grocery store to pick up some snacks to take on our hike the next day. We also needed some dinner, so we found an Italian restaurant that was thankfully still open (it was about 9:15pm and many things were already closed) and ran over there to get a table for 12 - most of the group joined us, though not all. Dinner was excellent and when the restaurant closed at 11 we headed back to our hotel to get some sleep. Wednesday morning we got up early and took a chartered bus to hike up Preikestolen. The hike is about 5 miles round trip and took us 4.5 hours to complete. The terrain is very rocky and the top is almost 2000 feet above sea level so it is a significant climb up/down. There were many beautiful scenes along our way, but unfortunately the top was very foggy and you could not see the fjord below. On our way back down, we got rained on a bit, so b...