The Scariest Norwegian New Year's
- Lucy and the lens
- Jan 16, 2019
- 7 min read
This is the story of the scariest travel experience I've had to date. And I've done some scary things: riding on the back of a motorcycle along the impossibly busy streets of Cambodia; jumping out of a plane for fun; nearly getting thrown from a safari jeep driven by a maniac in Sri Lanka....This, however, was a whole different level of fear.
But I'll begin at the beginning....
For New Year's 2018/19, we decided to head back to Norway, where we spent last winter too. Why? First and foremost, our dog loves the snow more than anything, and seeing him jump around in it was the best thing about our trip last year! Beyond that, we loved that cosy feeling you get when you're curled up in front of a log fire, with a mug of hot chocolate with a dash of Baileys and a marshmallow roasting on a stick. It's a distinctly Scandinavian feeling that you just can't replicate anywhere else!
We were aiming for a similar trip to last year's adventure (which you can read about here for contrast!): a few days in the snowy mountains north of Lillehammer, followed by New Year's itself over in the fjords - the Sognefjord, to be exact.
But things didn't work out quite the way they had the year before....
Phase 1: There's snow place like Norway!
We instantly fell in love with the cabin that we'd found on AirBnB, situated about 25 minutes north of the ski resort town of Lillehammer. It was in a very secluded area - just how we like it - with incredible panoramic views of the snow-covered mountains surrounding it. The wooden house had a log fire and unlimited wood to burn, so our evening routine involved cooking dinner (we brought all our food with us to avoid the outrageous Norwegian prices!), pouring a shot of Baileys into a hot chocolate, and toasting marshmallows on the fire to make into s'mores. By the end of the trip, we'd nailed the perfect s'more! There was no WiFi at the cabin, but it didn't matter - we cosied up in blankets and read as many books as we could, or played board games. It was a much-needed escape from reality into the middle of a snowy wonderland.
During the day, we explored the area, taking short drives up mountains to capture stunning views, or just taking walks up the mountain our cabin was sitting on. It was a pretty relaxed few days, not counting the one time we got stuck in a snowbank and had to flag down a passing local to help us push the car back out again.
The highlight of our stay in this area was the 3:15pm sunsets: almost every night we were treated to a technicolour display from our great vantage point halfway up the mountain. One night, the sky was so vividly fiery that it even made the local news!
If only we'd just stayed there in front of the fire, with our hot chocolate and our s'mores. If only...
Phase 2: A series of unfortunate events
New Year's Eve: it was time to say goodbye to our wonderful mountain cabin and hit the road, heading west towards the fjords. There was a harsh wind that morning as we loaded up the car, but we didn't think much of it: we saw that snow was forecast over in the fjords, rather than the usual rain, so we were looking forward to more snowball fights and the cosy fire we'd light when we arrived in the fjord region of Vik in six hours' time.
The first couple of hours went well: the wind was soon joined by rain but we still made some quick scenic stops for some photos and a sandwich. We discovered a 900-year old stave church when we passed through the town of Lom, as well as some dramatic frozen riverscapes.
We'd been driving Norway's well-kept main road, the E6, but eventually the time came to leave it and head north on the mountain road. Our GPS wanted us to drive around the Sognefjord, down the other side, and take a ferry to our final destination. One road: simple, straightforward.....closed??
As we climbed higher and higher on the mountain road, we noticed the weather changing from drizzle to...well, blizzard. The wind whipped the snow horizontally against the windshield and rocked our little car from side to side. After a while, we noticed that all tire tracks had vanished, and we were making new tracks in the fresh, untouched snow. We saw no traffic either behind us, or coming towards us.
We knew we were in trouble when a flood appeared across the road ahead of us: a flood that had quickly frozen into an ice rink. Somehow surviving that, we drove on for a couple more miles until we saw a strange, flashing light in the distance. The light was attached to a barrier. The barrier was down. The road was closed.
We sat there stunned for a few seconds, and then wondered why this barrier hadn't been there at the start of our hour-long drive up the mountain! The thing you have to know about driving in Norway is that there really aren't that many roads. You can't just backtrack a little and then choose another route. No; you have to drive all the way back. We'd been driving for four and a half hours. We now had to drive four and a half hours back to Lillehammer, our starting point, followed by a further 6 hours on a different route to Vik.
We tried not to think too hard about the fact that our 5pm arrival had somehow now turned into an 11:45pm arrival, on New Year's Eve. Our goal was now to make it there before midnight.
We had some fun on our painfully long journey - we passed through the world's longest tunnel, the 24km long Laerdal Tunnel, so long that it has three colourfully-lit 'caves' inside it, that hypnotised or claustrophobic drivers can use to take a break from the monotony. We used one of them to hold a silent disco, obviously.
Things got tense again when we gained altitude, finding ourselves in a fog so thick that we could barely see a metre in front of us - and the signs warning us to look out for moose crossings didn't help! By this point it was after 10pm, and the snow ploughs seemed to have phoned it in for the night, as had everybody else: we were the only car on the road, just two hours before the New Year.
We made it through the fog and came out the other side shaken but determined, with just 40 minutes left to our final destination. We came to the road - the only road - leading to the town, only to see the most depressing word in the Norwegian language: stengt. Closed. Even seeing that word now gives me heart palpitations and makes my stomach flip.
Peering up the road, it looked freshly ploughed, and we could see the lights of a town ahead, so we continued on. So far, so good. We made it to the ski resort town of Myrkdalen just as the clock turned to midnight and fireworks surrounded us. We had 30km to go. We kept driving, through the town and out the other side. Onto a section of the road that hadn't been ploughed.
We drove. Ahead of us, we saw an ominious flashing light: the red glow of a barrier. But it was open! Perhaps the 'stengt' warning no longer applied, we thought hopefully. We kept driving. The snow on the road grew thicker as the altitude climbed higher. Just 20km to go though - surely we'd make it? Then, another flashing light appeared ahead of us. Another barrier. But this one was closed.
The utter panic that set in at this point was like nothing I've ever felt before. We were stranded, the only road to our warm bed for the night physically barricaded, and the snow on the road behind us settling thicker than ever. We glared at the barrier, wondering for one mad moment whether we could just drive straight through it.
We didn't, wisely. Instead, we gathered our senses and slowly drove our way back to the town of Myrkdalen, looked up the one - very expensive - hotel in the place, and got ourselves a room. They didn't accept dogs, so we had to sneak ours into the hotel in a holdall. No shame: we were desperate! We arrived at 1:30am. We'd quite literally rung in the New Year stranded, in a car, in a blizzard. Like many people at the hotel that night, but for very different reasons, we didn't get much sleep. We were too busy wondering where the heck we'd be sleeping the following night if the road to our AirBnB remained closed.
Phase 3: The return
As terrible travel experiences tend to do, it all worked itself out in the end. We messaged our first Air BnB host and begged her to take us back, and she agreed. We called AirBnB, who offered to refund us for our stay in Vik and pay half of our emergency hotel's outrageous rate. Our included hotel breakfast featured caviar - caviar for breakfast! - and perked us up a bit. All we had to do now was drive the seven hours back to the Lillehammer area.
Wonderful.
The one brightside to all of this was that we got a chance to see the fjords in daylight, as opposed to our night-time adventure the day before. We discovered this stunning view:
...And we stopped for another little party in the Laerdal Tunnel, too.
The best part of our day was pulling up to our first little cabin and feeling like we'd come home. Neither of us had wanted to leave, and it just felt right to be back.
We celebrated New Year's at 8:32pm on the 1st of January, with some airport duty-free Prosecco and a s'more.
Phase 4: Snow days
Our sense of adventure pretty much spent, we spent the rest of our time in Norway sticking to wintery walks through the snow in search of more beautiful sunsets and snowbanks for our dog to bury himself in. Nothing eventful happened, and that was exactly the way we wanted it after spending two days in a car negotiating wind, fog, rain, ice floods, blocked roads, and a blizzard!
At least we had s'mores.
The End.
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