30 Jun 1985, Posted by Scott An Chora in Travelogue, No Comments.

06/30 Trondheim, Norway

With the morning sun we said our good-byes and headed south back toward Trondheim.  Jim turned into a broken record and kept repeating his exploits.  When he finally he fell asleep, I soon followed.  Somewhere in the middle of a dream the train came to a stop and a voice was broadcast over the intercom.  Everybody around us quickly got up out of their seat and ran toward the doors.  I didn’t need to understand Norwegian to know I should be doing the same.  The first thought that entered my mind was perhaps there was a bomb onboard.  I woke Jim up and explained that we should quickly get off the train too.  As it turned out, the tracks ahead were washed out due to a storm and all these passengers were hustling to get good seats on buses.  Well, we didn’t act as quickly as the locals and ended up with the booby prize, bad seats at the back of the bad bus.  The seat I managed to get wasn’t that bad but Jim’s ended up being in the seat from Hell.  He sat up against the window with three drunks to his right.  They grabbed my broken guitar and attempted to demonstrate that they could not carry a tune or remember the words to a single song.  Their lack of ability to sing and or play the guitar irritated some and made the others laugh.  Eventually the alcohol wore them down into a third gear and then it really got comical, unless you were Jim.  They were the sleeping dominos.  Their sleeping heads would shift with the movement of the bus, first giving Jim a bit of room and then squeezing him up against the window.  Even Jim would have thought this was comical if he had anybody else’s point of view.

A couple of stops and a couple of sites and we finally ended up in Trondheim late.  Our little detour ate up the day and forced us to quicken our pace if we were ever going to make the hostel’s curfew.  I was uninterested in forking out extra cash for a hotel room or trekking around the city to locate a vacancy.  We crossed the finished line with a few minutes to spare.  Once we were checked in we wandered about the town to see the sights.  While connecting up train schedules we discovered that in order for us to arrive in Amsterdam mid-day on the fourth and to connect up with Solsberg on the way, we would have to make an early train out of Trondheim the next day and had to depart very early.  Since we were heading back to Scandinavia after our Amsterdam party, Solsberg offered to watch our gear so that we could travel light.  Breakfast came along with the cost of the room, so we made arrangements with the front desk to have breakfast an hour earlier than posted to make our train.

I was awoken from a dream by the sounds of somebody scratching my bed.  I discovered there was a porcupine outside my window sharpening his nails on a small tree.  I decided to crawl out the window and followed him for a while.  I stood there in the darkness, looking up past the dark giants that lined the horizon with the moon nowhere to be seen.  As I focused my eyes and looked into the sea of stars, my mind began to reel with amazement.  The reality of how vast this all is, how small I am and how little I know rushed into my head.  “Talk to me and tell me the truth” I asked the stars.  The fabric of space, quasars, gravity, the clustering of dark matter, anti-matter, time, distance, all of this speak to me of order and design with a purpose unknown to me.  But if there a single rule that can’t be changed there is an intent, a purpose.  The plan just unwinds too slowly for me get wind of it.

I’m one who’s not worthy of the heights that I seek.
Untried strength may fail me, halfway up these mountain peaks

I suppose I dwell in silence, yet no fear to speak my mind,
still I frightened by commitments, of thought that cling like veins,

so the golden rays of lover’s light, may never find or lead my way
my path may always lead through night, still waiting on the day

Everybody was still asleep.  Only the sounds coming from the kitchen broke the silence.  We wandered in from the dark to see what breakfast consisted of and discovered a feast of fruits, every luncheon meat imaginable, six types of cheeses, multiple styles of bread, a stack of hardboiled eggs at least two feet high and most importantly, nobody to chaperone us.  We each grabbed two plates and filled them with enough food to accommodate a long train ride.  We were travelers on a budget and need to take advantage of these types of opportunities when they presented themselves.

The train we met at the station had “Business Express” written all over its exterior.  We thought, now were going to moving.  We grabbed a couple of seats across from one another in first class, put the plates of food under our seats and broke out the cards for a game of cribbage.  I don’t know if it was because the two of us were wearing bathing suits or because we had plates of food under our seat but the other passengers were giving us snooty glances.  There was a look of anticipation of our removal on their faces, waiting for the social scales to be put back into balance.  A voice came across the loud speaker, explaining that this train required reservations and those that didn’t have one would be assessed an additional fee.  We weren’t too sure what that all meant and discussed the possibility of moving to second class where perhaps the fee would be less, if any at all.  Around us, the other passengers were all smiling and you could almost hear their thoughts.  “Don’t you kids know this is first class?”  We started to get that feeling when the game begins to look out of reach as if we need to concede the wager.  At that moment a couple came into the department and asked Jim to move out of their seat.  She had a reservation in her hand with Jim’s seat number on it and another one for the seat next to him.  Everyone was all just watching us and waiting for the conductor to take us away into train detention.  Jim moved into the seat to my left against the window.  Then a young lady pushed a food cart with a cash resister attached to its side.  “Coffee, Tea?” she asked each guest as she passed through the compartment.  The conductor was behind her validating tickets, “Tickets please?” and gestured for us to hand them to him.  We handed him our passes and prepared ourselves for the bad news but to our surprise he handed them back and asked if we would prefer coffee or tea with our complimentary breakfast.  It seemed they’d just have to live with us.  We wandered back into our game of cribbage but this time we had food both on the table in front of us and under our seats.  That day led right into a game of train tag, with the exception of stopping by Solsberg’s parent’s house to drop our gear.  Solsberg was out at a local party and we missed the chance to say hello and give our thanks for her kindness.

We jumped a train in Oslo and headed south through Copenhagen towards Amsterdam.  We ended up in a compartment with a bunch of children.  Half of them were traveling along side their high school teacher on a summer trip from the states.  Somehow we ended up in the compartment with the teacher and two older kids heading home from holiday in Sweden.  We got pulled into a conversation with the teacher about the war he had served in and some of the treks he had experienced in his youth.  He told us that he smoked some weed back then but still was curious about the effects of hash.  One of the young men broke out some tobacco and few pieces of hash and I rolled one up for the group.  We laid down in the dark and wandered into the night while Zeppelin played in the background.  I grew so accustomed to the rhythm of the train that it acts like sedative and put me right to sleep.  I actually slept very well.