Puffin/Sea parrot and the impossible task to drive in Norway

Since the evening and night in the lighthouse was such a lovely experience for us, we wanted to stay another night there. Unfortunately the lighthouse itself was already booked, but the owner of the lighthouse, Bettina, told us that we could stay the night in the storm house, next to the lighthouse. With the beautiful surrounding – how could say no?

Bettina also told us that there was a possibility to see Puffins/Sea parrots close by the lighthouse, only 53 km away according to the GPS. 53 km shouldn’t take us more than 2 hours to drive in Norway, right?! I mean in Sweden we would calculate 1 hour. So 2 hours’ drive there, 1 hour to watch the birds and 2 hours back would mean that we would be back in the storm house for dinner around 8 pm. Perfect – we thought.

So off we went. Of course we noticed that the road was narrow and winding. We also managed to just miss a ferry and had to wait more than 30 minutes for the next one. But still – we didn’t think that it would be 7 o’clock when we arrived to the national park with the Puffins/Sea Parrots. Never mind, we thought. We will take a different way back that should be much straighter, with more frequent traffic ferries and therefor faster.

The walk up to the bird watching place was extremely steep, but after our hike to the hut some days before – we thought it was quite easy. :-)

We arrived at the place for bird watching and found ourselves a good spot between all the amateur photographers with 800-1000 mm lenses. We didn’t sit there for more than 10 minutes when a puffin/sea parrot landed just in front of us with his (?) mouth full with fish. We couldn’t believe our luck. None of us had a really long lens on our cameras (mine is 300 mm), but the bird sat so close to us so we could take GOOD close up pictures with our cameras.

We sat there for another 20 minutes and watched the birds fly by. It was beautiful and amazing, but no other bird came so close. So we decided to leave and drive back. On the way back to the car another bird landed just next to us and we could -  again - take some nice close up pictures. It was truly magical.

When we came down to the car again it was nearly 8.30 pm. We realized that it would be late before we would be back, but we hoped it would not take another 4 hours.

The drive back started really good. It was a new built road with new wide tunnels. But then we came down to the ferry. We were now driving the E39, a MAIN road, and thought it would mean that the ferries would have regular traffic also during the night. But NO! We missed the ferry with 4 minutes and had to wait another ONE!!! hour for the next. The only thing we could do was to have dinner. And the only place we could eat dinner at was a junk food place. *sigh* But what else can you do than to accept the facts. Of course we also had miscalculated the quality of the rest of the road, so we arrived back at the storm house at 1 am. In other words – it was not a perfect day, but the view of the Puffin/Sea parrot made up for it. We were still happy!