First bluebells I’ve seen in years and years.

Tone and Simon gave me an extra nice treat on Sunday—an all-day road trip around the southernmost points of Norway. Road trips being my favorite form of recreation, and a road trip in Norway being about as scenic as would be geographically possible—may I just say it was a perfect day.

In our ten hours on the road we traveled by green fields pleasantly ornamented with white sheep and golden llamas and grand gray mountains; through well-preserved historic villages and by some of those famous fiords of Nordic legend. There were two geographic/historic standouts: Lindesnes and its lighthouse and the village of Loshavn.

Please enjoy this fat album of a full-day ‘on the road.’

We left at ten, me with great anticipation and Simon a bit happy as well as we were going to be covering some of the territory of his family’s ancestral farms and villages and he hadn’t been in awhile. Tone says they often enjoy Sunday drives, though perhaps not always as long as this one turned out to be.

I won’t try to name any of the locations except the two already mentioned above. Here’s the beginning…

The Lindesnes Lighthouse stands on the southernmost point of the mainland of Norway, nearly 1,100 mi southwest of the northernmost point of mainland Norway. May I brag just for one sentence—the lighthouse is 1413.62 miles from Longyearbyen where I just was!

Our next main stop was Loshavn is a small port village located at the mouth of the Lyngdalsfjorden. The village, with only a few residents has “perhaps the best-preserved wooden buildings along the southern coast of Norway. The place has history and character, especially from the years of the Gunboat War (1807-1814), the so-called ‘privateer era.’ During these years, Loshavn was militarized to protect the mainland from any British invasion and some of the residents also conducted formally-unauthorized hijacking of British ships, but with government approval, along the coast.”

This is where one side of Simon’s immediate family came from—he was often at one of the grand and stately white houses that make the village so distinctive. Although his family apparently was not part of the privateering…I enjoy thinking of him as a pirate since I know so few. It’s a nice change from touting us all as descendants of those bad-boy Vikings.

And then we took the long way home.