Good humor and luck

by Gabrielle Yates (United States of America)

A leap into the unknown Norway

The Atlantic Road pours out of the Eastern Norwegian countryside and slips in and over the churning sea like some forgotten ocean serpent turned to concrete and salt. The darling of photographers and car commercials, it is Architecture with a capital A, a stunning five-mile-long sculpture you can drive over while surrounded by soul-touching Norwegian fjords. The epitome of road trip destinations in Scandinavia, possibly the world. This is what my boyfriend, David, was reiterating to me as the cars clock hit midnight and we realized that the snowdrifts we were driving past had grown taller than the car. “Happy Easter!” he paused to yell at me and we both broke into a near delirious laughter. It was the sounding of two people who were steadily reaching the limits of how far good humor and luck can get you while traveling on a whim. Sixteen hours earlier we had woken up in a lean-to in Mons Klint, Denmark, some 1,300 km south, and discussed how to spend the last two days of our Easter break over cold, day-old gas station coffee. David had mentioned the Atlantic Road and after a quick google image search, we were driving north. Two broke college students in Europe for the first time, we were hungry to experience as much as possible, as cheaply as possible, and this somewhere along the line this had translated into an anemia toward rationalized planning. Thus was born the idea of an Easter break road trip through Scandinavia hopping between national parks and sleeping in public shelters. We would have Nature Channel view of the fjords and mountains right outside the car windows. But as of midnight, most of our experience of Norway was limited to what the headlights of our little sedan could illuminate, mostly ominous moose crossing signs and thin mountain tunnels that left my knuckles white on the steering wheel. What had signaled our laughter was the realization Norwegian national parks have very high elevations, and a whole lot of snow. There would be no hiking into a cozy shelter tonight. We thought it was the funniest thing in the world. Perhaps it was delirium from being in a car for most the day while only eating gas station hotdogs (we had soon found out all grocery stores and restaurants close for Easter weekend in Scandinavia), or perhaps the lack of oxygen from being so high up, but we spent a good half hour laughing and joking at our own idiocy before eventually finding a plowed driveway for fishing access outside of Rondale National Park, where we had originally planned to camp and parked for the night. We had gotten a few hours of sleep before the cold made it impossible. Even in a sleeping bag rated for zero Fahrenheit I was shivering as I turned on the car. “David look” I whispered. Our little sedan was reading the temperature outside to be negative twenty Celsius. Though we both later agreed that couldn’t be right, I believed it that morning as my hands burned from the cold, outside of my mittens for mere seconds to snap a photo of David as he grinned from ear to ear in the growing morning light. We had woken up in a fairytale morning, alone in a snow-covered world flushed pink as it waited for the sun to rise. Unbeknown to us, we had parked the night before in a grove of pine trees surrounding a frozen creek. Outside of that were rolling snowdrifts soft as fresh linens and a pastel pink. A quiet Norwegian Easter morning. For the first time in the road trip, we were both silent. We continued north from there, and eventually made it to the Atlantic road after many hours of winding mountain roads, ferries and countless more tunnels with Nature Channel views the entire way. David and I paused a moment in the whipping Scandinavian wind to take photos of each other in front of the famous roadway, then turned around to do it all again. Both of us full faith in the good humor and luck that is required for moments like these. It comes when you travel with your best friend.