Flam And The Train Ride

The next morning, we visited the lookout first, where the weather was great and great pictures were taken. On the way up we stopped several times to make pictures of the beautiful scenery. With it being spring, the baby sheep were out bouncing, playing, and calling out in their high-pitched tones to their mothers. Radhika immediately thought of the sheep in the first "Babe" movie and started calling out to the little ones "Baaaaaabe". My girl has many hidden talents, but I did not know speaking "sheep" was one of them!!! She held a 5+ minute conversation with a baby sheep 50 feet away from the car window!! Back and forth they went... it was "Baaaa" for "Baaaa" for what seemed like an eternity!!! Eventually the "cuteness" wore out for me as it felt like both were a railroad spike in my ears! The next time you see or talk to R, ask her to say something in "Norwegian Sheep". She's quite the natural.

We took the Flam Railway train to Myrdal in the afternoon. This is the most famous train trip in Norway for it's scenery. It was fantastic!! We bought a round trip ticket, but decided to hike down from Myrdal, which was the last stop, back to Flam which was, I believe something like a 6 mile distance. Well, Myrdal was covered in snow even though the air temperture was warm. In places the snow was piled to what I estimate was about 15 feet!! We started down the path alongside the tracks which soon turned away from them and into the forest and a river running down to the valley. Snow and ice were piled up everywhere! I wanted to strip down and have R take a picture of me in the snow carefully using it to conceal "things" and turn a "XXX" image into a "G" one. She thought I was out of my mind (has she met me?) so we compromised and I just went shirtless. It was so warm in the sun, but that ice did get cold fast! It didn't melt on me at all, so my skin stayed dry. I know, Florida boy being entranced by this seldomly seen cold, fluffy, white stuff. It was fun! I was aching to nail her on the side of the head with a snowball!! With the amount of it there, we could've had our own "shock and awe" battle!! We walked about 15 minutes to a section of the trail that was steep and completely covered in ice and snow. I tried to follow the 2 sets of footsteps left by people I guessed were several days old. After slipping several times, I retreated back up to where R was waiting. At this impasse, it was decided it was the perfect time to have a picnic. So we found a dry place in the sun, I carefully position my behind on a pointy, black rock, and we ate our sandwiches, talking and thinking about our situation. We decided to try it, and we slowly made our way through this section of the trail. I would hear a noise, turn around, and see Radhika on her ass in the snow with a big grin. We made our way past several train stops and more beautiful scenery. It was getting late, and when we stopped at another train station, we checked the schedule and found that the last train down the mountain would come by in under 20 minutes. We decided to take it, seeing as how we had roundtrip tickets anyway, believeing we would get back to Flam really late by foot. When the train stopped for us, the guy who let us on didn't seem happy to see us. Radhika tripped and fell "up" the stairs, and he seemed more annoyed at her clumsiness then concern for it! We joked about it all the way back up and then down, that they were pissed having to stop the train for the "stupid Americans"..."Trippy", who was Radhika, and me, "Dopey". On the way up we were 1 of 2 couples on the train. At Myrdal, they got off so we had the train all to ourselves. It was cool! We made it back to Flam where the place was quite empty as the weekend was gone and the tourist season hadn't kicked in yet. Back to the cabin... a great day of vacation!