Stavanger

I’ve been wanting to go on this trip with my mum for quite some time and I finally got her to come with me. So we went on a mother/daughter long weekend adventure in August.

We set out towards the train station with 11kg backpacks on our backs on a Friday afternoon. I’m honestly really surprised I got my mum to pack in a backpack and not a suitcase, but personally I think it’s easier when going on shorter trips and especially when we’re not staying in one place for the whole trip. So we strapped the backpacks on and took the train towards the airport. We had an evening flight and we made sure to be at the airport with plenty of time to spare. Which was a good thing because I’ve never before seen the line that long for security at Oslo airport, luckily it did move pretty fast though. So we got through security in about half an hour, found some food and waited for our flight. It wasn’t a long flight, we were only crossing the country, and Norway isn’t that wide. We arrived at our hotel, which was not exactly what we pictured, a little past 9 pm. My mum might never give me the responsibility of choosing the hotel again. Saying the building, and the room, was old and tired would be putting it mildly. The location was great though. After we were done (ish) being shocked by the state of our room we quickly got ready to go find some food and a couple of drinks. A lot of restaurants close a bit early though and by the time we got out the door not much was open and serving food, so we ended up at Peppes Pizza, which is a Norwegian chain. We didn’t really feel like pizza though and opted for a burger and a taco salad, both were disappointing. I have had both Pizza and other things I was happy with at the chain before, but this particular restaurant wasn’t too good.

After we finished our meals we went looking for a bar to have one drink before bed. We walked through the cool colour street, which is pretty nice both day and night. We ended up going into a bar at the bottom of the street, so technically on the next street. “Frøken Pil” is a karaoke bar on Fridays and it was pretty cool. We actually stayed for 2 drinks, their cocktails are pretty good. Unfortunately, a more and more drunk woman, who had a decent voice before she got drunk, kept singing, and choosing songs most Norwegians would never have heard of. (I think they were in Portuguese.) It was time to get to bed after the second drink anyways.

On our only full day in Stavanger we got up early and left the “hotel” before 9 am. Our plan for the day was to explore and geocache our way through the city. We started with the closest geocache at the harbour. After looking, unsuccessfully, for a few minutes a police car pulled up. So we explained to the police woman that we were looking for a geocache and what it would look like, she was nice enough to offer us gloves, as she was not sure we should be touching the thing the geocache was supposed to be attached to. We accepted her gloves and after wishing us luck she was on her way. We didn’t find the cache, but we did notify the cache owner who said they'd check on it. We continued geocaching by walking down “Fargegaten”, the colour street. We got breakfast from a bakery, explored narrow streets and saw some pretty cool street art. Stavanger has a lot of cool little things; cool murals, statues, some hidden “gems” and beautiful white streets. Unfortunately, the big cruise ships docket at the harbour all day, not to mention the crowds from them on guided walks, do take away from the beauty a little. But we still had a great day geocaching in the beautiful weather.

When it was getting closer to evening we got pastries from a bakery and went back to our musty hotel room to relax a little, and I felt the need for a shower. So we ate our pastries and relaxed before getting ready for dinner. My mum wanted a proper steak so we found a few steak restaurants on the map and headed out. As the weather was turning we didn’t want to walk around too much so we headed straight for the restaurants on our “list”. The first one was fully booked, and on the way to the second one we saw more restaurants that were clearly full. We thought we were lucky when a table opened up as we were asking at XO steakhous, it turned out we shouldn’t have gone in though. It took over 30 minutes to order. Because, naturally, only one of the three employees going around the restaurant could actually take the order, and poor the drinks. It took 15 minutes for us to get the glass of wine and cider we ordered and another half hour to get the food. And the steak was over cooked, so we’d waited well over an hour for over cooked food, and the server was a little rude too. We got a discount, but not enough and we left the restaurant feeling pretty disappointed.

We decided to head to the "colour street" and ended up at the bar from the night before again, we had one drink there, but Saturday night is clearly very different from Friday. The music was really loud, the dj kept ruining the songs, and the vibe was very different. So we left again after the one drink. We ended up walking down to the harbour area, which was beautiful with all the lights and the boats. No cruise ships at that late hour. We ended up at another karaoke bar, a bigger one with a long list of people wanting to sing. Some were great, some not so much, but the song selections were mostly pretty good and we could sing along to several of the songs. After a drink at this bar it was time to get to bed, we were moving on in the morning and couldn’t sleep in too long.

Sunday morning we packed our bags and actually did a little bit of geocaching, the virtual kind, on our way to the bus station. We were headed up to “preikestolen base camp” where we were spending the next night. Because of the weather forecast we decided to not do the big hike on the Sunday, but rather wait until Monday when the weather was better.

So we left our backpacks at the hotel and left for a little bit of geocaching in the area. We walked along a trail going around a lake but the trail was a bit wet and the gnats were really annoying around the first geocache along the trail. We didn’t find the cache and decided to turn around and go back.

We did find a good spot to sit down for a minute before going back to base camp though. As we were getting back it started raining so we ducked into the souvenir shop/ boot rental and waited it out. It was over in a few minutes and we could sit down with lunch and a glass of wine at the café. We had a view towards the start/end of the trail we’d opted out of walking because of the unstable weather and we were a little surprised with a lot of people’s choice of attire. I know some people say it’s an “easy” hike, but that doesn’t mean you should walk this trail in jeans and light summer trainers. Shortly after we’d eaten our food the sky opened up, as we like to say in Norwegian. We ran inside and found a table while it started to pour down outside. While we were sitting there we decided to get some ice cream and ended up chatting to a few people at nearby tables.

When the rain let up again for a few minutes I went to the souvenir shop to get a deck of cards before we moved to the restaurant at the hotel. We played cards until we started to get a little hungry, then had dinner, honestly not really worth the price but it’s the only thing there.

After dinner we got our stuff and walked down to our accommodations for the night. A half barrel. The barrels are alright, there is a couple of mattresses in them, there is light, and it seemed you could also charge your devices in there. We’d charged our phones at the restaurant though. So the barrels are surpringly okay, except one thing; the toilets. We had to walk over 100 meters (uphill) to get to a toilet and a place to get ready for the night/morning. Really not ideal. We turned in early and my mum was actually asleep before 9:30 pm, which is unusual for her. Even more unusual is her getting up early, so I’m still a little shocked I got her up at 4 am.

We had to walk the more than 100 meters to go to the toilet, brush our teeth and get ready for the day. Then we went back to our barrel and got our backpacks packed, back up the hill to leave our luggage at the hotel, and then we were ready. We started the trail at 5:13 am. It was pretty dark when we left the hotel, but by the time we got to the first plateau it was already getting a bit lighter. It was a lovely hike over stone steps, trails and wooden walk ways. The sky was pretty clear and the mist by the ground was a little magical. We didn’t get a proper sunrise, we were on the wrong side of the mountain when the sun came up anyways. But we did see some pink in the sky in the opposite direction and when the sun came up from behind some clouds as we were coming to a plateau with a view in the right direction it was absolutely magical. And I got my favorite pictures of the hike. But we still had a ways to go before we reached the pulpit rock, or Preikestolen in Norwegian. We reached it around 8 am, after walking for nearly 3 hours. We had taken our time though, I stopped for photos every now and again and my mum did some virtual geocaches called Adventure labs. When we reached the top we spent some time enjoying the view and taking photos for a little while before finding the geocache hidden in the area and then making our way back down the trail.

On our way back we really got to see how popular this trail is. We had to stop and let people going up pass us before we could go down, and they were basically queuing. Seeing this made us even more happy we’d started as early as we had, it would have been frustrating walking behind all those people. I wish most people would be a little better at letting us past though, I tried to be considerate and let people past but at times I had to just squeeze past people as no one did the same for us and we’d be waiting too long at every turn if we didn’t just go.

When we got back to basecamp I got my souvenir glass, I always need a shot glass, if they have them, of iconic places like this. Then we got changed and rearranged our backpacks before we sat down at a bench outside and waited for our bus back to Stavanger. When we arrived in Stavanger a little before 1 pm we left our backpacks in a locker at the train station and went to find lunch. We ended up getting food from Burger King and 7-eleven and ate that in the sun. Then it was time for some more walking, and geocaching. The weather was beautiful and we geocached for a few hours before going to the shopping centre. When I realised they had a New Yorker in Stavanger I had quickly decided we would shop before leaving Stavanger. My mum and I both found some clothes we liked and were pretty happy with our purchases. Then it was time to find a place for dinner. We ended up at Egon, a chain restaurant where we’d also had lunch a couple of days before. This time our food wasn’t too great though, my boring lasagna was also badly burned at the edges and my mum’s pasta wasn’t warm. When one of the servers came by and asked if the food was alright I did let them know about my food, and we both got dessert on the house, so that made up for the bad food. We headed towards the train station after dinner, got the geocache hidden there, found a shop for some snacks and then got our backpacks to reorganise and get changed for a night on the train going back home. Conclusion: So what did we learn on this trip? Well, do more research about a hotel, even when it’s in Norway. Because even though I expect the standard to be okay at all Norwegian hotels, that isn’t actually the reality. And when going for popular Norwegian hikes definitely go as early as possible, or I suspect quite late in the day could be okay too for a hike that isn’t too long. And this isn’t. I do realise we walked for 5-6 hours, but it really didn’t feel that bad. I quite liked the hike and might do it again someday. I want to say though, if you’re planning on walking this yourself; wear proper shoes. It’s easy to slip and hurt yourself if you don’t have proper shoes, even if the hike is fairly easy and the trail is pretty good. I wear mountain boots for hikes like this and we could tell that my shoes were a bit better than my mums shoes, even though they do look about the same as mine, until you look underneath and see that mine have deeper groves. If you don’t own proper shoes for hiking they do actually rent them out at the souvenir shop at basecamp. (I haven’t seen this at other trails I’ve walked in this country, but this is one of the most popular ones we’ve got.) All in all we had a great trip and we were fairly lucky with the weather, we had a day with rain, but knew it could happen and were lucky that the weather was good the next morning.