Herring with potatoes and sour cream at marg & bein, where I also enjoyed the plukkfisk with bacon.
Elk sausage and my favorite Norwegian cheese, a brown cheese that tastes like caramel and is made from goat and cow’s milk.
Holding outside Bergen.
June 23 — Kjeller, Norway to Bergen, Norway
Holding en route to the coast
Learning how to fly holding patterns is a required element of getting an instrument rating, and logging at least one hold every six months generally is required to stay current i.e. able to use your rating. But actually flying a hold outside of the training environment is very rare. So I was surprised when air traffic control instructed me to enter a holding pattern as I approached Bergen.
Bergen’s airport has one runway and a lot of airline traffic, and I had the misfortune of arriving at a time when a lot of airliners were coming or going. I ended up holding for 30 minutes; in the 30 minutes before I landed, six Widerøe (a Scandinavian regional carrier) flights landed, as well as a KLM flight from Amsterdam and a CityJet flight from Copenhagen, and there were, of course, departures, too.
It’s also possible the controllers forgot about me after I entered the hold. Things happen. Anyway, this isn’t a complaint. The controllers are very good, and weaving a less predictable and slower airplane flown by a private pilot in amongst the airline traffic is not an easy job. I helped out by keeping my speed up as long as possible once they freed me from the hold to fly the approach.
Bergen is a lovely city, with the highlight being the colorful buildings used by the Hanseatic League, a confederation of guilds that dominated northern European sea trade from the 13th to the 15th century. Another highlight, for me, was the food (see photos).
One underrated place to meet people while traveling is the laundromat. It’s easy to start a conversation when somebody is helping someone else figure out how to use the machines. I met a group from Sun Valley, Idaho who were doing a bicycling trip; they hadn’t brought their own bicycles, but they had brought their seats and pedals.