Figure 8 On A Bike

We woke up to a light frost on the tent before sunrise. It was just warm enough with our equipment but we were looking forward to sleeping indoors and then flying south (since Scotland is known for being so warm in the fall :P). We packed up the tent wet and rolled to the bus station in Åndalsnes to catch the bus to Molde. This bus apparently does double duty as a school bus as there were a lot of school children who hopped on. This was another one of those moments where it hit me that I am not just on a summer vacation and I would not be returning to the classroom this fall. When we arrived in Molde we headed straight to a cafe to kill some time and enjoy our last cafe in Norway (and feed our caffeine addiction). We really just did a cafe tour of Norway. We don't know much about how Norwegians dine, but we are fairly familiar with their bakery items! We rolled our bikes towards home for the night. We knew the way as we were returning to the same KOA style RV park/cabi...

With about a week remaining on our visa for Norway, we had time for one last excursion but also needed a real plan about how to escape to the UK from the Schengen zone. Storm Hans over the summer had washed away some of the rail bridges to Oslo, so managing to catch trains farther south wasn't looking good (not to even mention the number of different trains we'd need to get from Oslo to the UK). We'd really wanted to check out some of the southern Norwegian mountains, in the Romsdal area, and discovered that Widerøe (now our favorite airline) ran a flight from Molde to Aberdeen, in Scotland. Perfect! We definitely had some apprehension about disassembling and packing the bikes ourselves and then flying with them, but it sounded much more palatable than taking 6 different trains. As for how to get ourselves and the bikes all the way south to Molde (without having to pedal)... there's a boat! Boats are our favorite because there's no fuss (well, sometimes my seasick...