We  only spent a few hours in Oslo before heading for the mountains.  After getting used to driving on the wrong side of the road on the wrong side of the car and doing roundabouts the opposite way we headed towards the Holmenkillen Ski Jump about 30 minutes outside of Oslo.

The ski jump was impressive!  It was very steep for obvious reasons, but I didn’t get a sense of how steep until I got there and wandered up as far as you could go without ending up paying for a zipline ticket.  Oh yes, people were ziplining down the ski jump.  You can just make them out in my photos.  After visiting the ski jump we drove towards the mountains.  About an hour and half later we stopped for the night in a place called Notodden, had a steak dinner and then spent a few hours on the pool table at the hotel.  We didn’t choose the hotel just because it had a pool table.

The next day was interesting and I’m going to do it in point form otherwise nobody will read until the end!

  • About 30 mins outside of Notodden, which is quite famous for its blues & jazz festival, is a famous triple staved church.  It was very impressive, but it wasn’t symmetrical!
  • The plan was the head towards Rjukan, and along the route I saw a sign for the road we needed and made the executive decision to follow it.  It was the road we wanted, but it was extremely scenic and we stopped for lunch and enjoyed the scenery.
  • We continued a bit further and came across a little bus stop in the middle of nowhere and it was stunning.  I could have spent days photographing the area.
  • As we continued towards Rjukan we decided that we had just enough time to have a look at the Vemork heavy water plant, we got there 30 minutes before it closed so they were kind enough to give us free entry!  We even got a ride back to the car park on the pensioner’s bus 🙂
  • As it was getting close to dinner time we thought we might want to find a place to stay for the night.  We ended up travelling up and up and up a mountain and ended up at a ski hostel; turns out everyone had left for the summer and we had the place to ourselves 🙂
  • We sat down to dinner on the decking with a view of Gaustatoppen Mountain – the tallest one in the Telemark area of Norway.  From the summit you can see a 1/6th of all of Norway!  That’s where we decided to head the next day.  Those photos to come in the next post.

A slideshow of the photos can be seen on my youtube channel, this particular slideshow is titled Rjukan.  As always, the mass of photos are below if  you just want to look at specific ones.