...
... right?
We were down at breakfast at 6:30 for another fabulous spread and then back up to the room to finish packing and get out of town. Check out of the hotel and we're on the road at 7:30 AM. Should put us in our next destination maybe by 8 PM for a nice dinner maybe.
And then ... at 7:40 AM ... the day came to a crashing end ... and I do mean crashing. Just when I was thinking I was getting more than used to driving in Norway ... which does drive on the right side of the road (sorry Brits) ... I lost a moments of concentration coming into a round-about ... checked to my right ... but missed a nice Norwegian lady driving a VW coming in from a side street on the left ... and decided to introduce my Mercedes left front wheel with her right front fender.
...
The VW won! Wellllllll ... kind of. Even at 15 mph, my front left wheel was rendered useless, while her car was drivable ... but a bit dinged up for sure. Not a good way to start the day at all.
Long story short, tons of calls to Hertz service, my insurance company, on and on and on ... we finally got things kind of settled up. A police car came by within 15 minutes after the accident ... asked if anybody was hurt ... and when he found out we were OK, he just left. The police only get involved if there's a dispute or if somebodies hurt. Other than that, the citizens of Norway fill out there own paperwork and things proceed on. Totally foreign concept to those of us from America.
Amazingly (because I thought it would be totally worse) by 10:30 AM we had a tow truck drag our wounded car to a car shop, give us a lift to the local Hertz office, gotten a replacement car, and gotten back to our wounded car to retrieve our luggage. Talk to me in another couple of months as to whether our insurance, the nice Norwegians ladies insurance, and Hertz insurance can work things out without costing me a minor fortune, but as of 10:30 AM we were back on the road trying to carry on our vacation. It definitely put a gloom on the day ... particularly knowing that we weren't going to get to our next destination until late late at night ... but at least we were on our way. It only made it marginally worse that it start raining at about 1 PM and didn't stop until about 9 PM.
So the day from h%&^ drive looked like this.
And if you've lost track of how big of a country Norway is, here's a reminder.
It really was beautiful country to drive through (even in the rain and fog) but we were in such a hurry just to keep going that the only time we took pics was on a ferry ride about midway through the journey.
So that's all the pics you get for the day. I hope you enjoy the rainy pics as much as we enjoyed the rainy day. :)
Anyway, we finally got to the hotel in Alta at 11:45 PM, having stopped at a convenience store for "dinner" and munching on Pringles and Reindeer Jerkey as we drove down the road. As of this writing I already know the results of the next day ... which I promise you is much MUCH better than this day was. Every vacation deserves one day from h^&%, so at least we got this one behind us.
But the day/night did end up on a high note. Reading my email at half after midnight, I had a question from my good friend Karen (our company accountant) wondering if Tina had paid a tax bill we owed next week. Tina had indeed ... at least ending the day on a good point. Not very often that an accountant brings the day to a good end. :) (FYI - Karen's a really REALLY nice and good friend ... she just works in a bad profession!) :)
Until tomorrow ...
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