Needless to say, I’m not going anywhere for spring break this year. But last year, my then-ten-year-old daughter and I went to Norway. A chunk of our trip was dedicated to the “Norway in a Nutshell” tour. Like the Golden Circle in Iceland, it’s a roughly defined loop in the southern part of the country with a few popular tourist attractions that have been built up into “you haven’t been there if you missed this” status. I wrote about the first part of this trip within a trip earlier. Now you can read the rest of the story.
I expected the village of Flåm to be a pit stop on our DIY Norway in a Nutshell tour. Instead, it turned out to be a vacation highlight. It’s true that the appeal is purely one of atmosphere – there’s not much going on in Flåm, and almost nothing that would count as a tourist attraction per se. Unless you believe in the concept of the destination brewery. Which I do. And Flåm has a doozy of a destination brewery in Ægir.
Flåmsbrygga
There are literally only about a half dozen buildings in Flåm proper, and most of them belong to Flåmsbrygga, a hotel built right on the waterfront of the fjord, just steps from the ferry terminal. Although the building exteriors are designed to evoke the great halls of Vikings (or at least their churches), the kitsch stops at the door and the hotel rooms are modern and stylish, and not even that expensive by Norwegian standards. I was tempted to stay that but an extremely tight budget (and my daughter’s infatuation with bunk beds) landed us in a cabin at the campground instead. Which was fine, because we were very happy there, and we still got to eat dinner at the hotel.
Ægir Brewery
Among the cluster of Flåmsbrygga buildings is the brewery. Named Ægir after the Norse god famed for quality brewing, Ægir is one of Norway’s top craft breweries with an attached pub on the ground floor and a fancier restaurant upstairs. The décor is ski lodge meets stave church and I loved it. Although their award-winning beers are available in several Nordic countries, they do not export to the U.S., so my only chance of tasting them was at the source.
The Beer
They have a huge range of beers with some seasonal rotation.
The day I went there, I got a tasting flight of five beers:
They were all good – even the beers I wouldn’t normally drink, like the porter or the blonde, were tasty. They were also obviously part of a different brewing tradition than the brew culture I live in. All of the beers were more lightly carbonated and hopped than I’m used to. This made them feel thinner, but it also allowed for more subtlety and nuance than the beer I usually down.
Being from the PNW, I’m all about the IPA, and being more familiar with IPAs, that’s what I gave the most scrutiny. The Ægir IPA was different in the ways I’ve described, but still very recognizable as an IPA. Nearly everything I drink at home uses Amarillo and Cascade hops. This beer was hopped differently, and I was surprised how much it affected the overall character of the brew. I had to ask and discovered that there were some Citra hops, which I’m familiar with, but the primary hop was an Eastern European variety. (Unfortunately, I’ve lost my notes and don’t remember which one it was.) Anyway, it was a great reminder how easy it is to get stuck in a provincial rut, and how delightful to break out of it. I had forgotten it was possible to be surprised by the flavor of IPA.
I also picked up a can of the Upstate IPA for enjoying later
back at the cabin. Cold and canned, this one was familiar in flavor, although still
more lightly hopped than I’m used to. And that’s fine, because even though I
love them, I recognize that PNW IPAs are, objectively speaking, too heavy on
the hops. That means the Ægir IPAs were actually perfectly balanced.
The Food
Food trucks have overtaken the brewpub culture where I live,
so it was a delight to sit down to a real gastropub dinner. At Ægir,
they offer a seasonal Viking Plank, a five-course meal served with beer
pairings. The dishes are modern gastro-pub fare, but made with local, historic
ingredients that would (mostly) have been familiar to the Vikings who lived in
this fjord a millennium ago. The best part of this modern sensibility is that
there was a vegetarian version – hallelujah!
It’s probably not worthwhile to go into too much detail about
the dishes, since they change regularly (and I can’t find my notes). But to
give you an idea, there was salad, vegetables, an open-faced veggie burger,
cheese, and a brownie. Like a lot of stylish food, the vegetables were in such
large pieces they were hard to eat. The veggie patty didn’t hold up very well
as a patty, but it was delicious, and a welcome change from the Gardenburger
that is literally everywhere at home. Brownies with whipped cream and
strawberry on top seem to be the molten chocolate cake of Norwegian
restaurants, and I’m down for it. But I’m easy. The real test was my kid. Like Mikey,
she hates everything. But she chowed down on her kids’ meal of meatballs and
mashed potatoes.
Would I Go Back?
Okay, I don’t actually believe that any restaurant merits a special trip from the West Coast of the U.S. to Scandinavia. And unless Ægir himself brewed it, the same could be said for any beer. But if I happened to be in the neighborhood – say Bergen or Oslo, a mere 5-10 hours away, depending on traffic/train schedules – yeah, I’d make a side trip to have dinner in Flåm at the Ægir Brewery.
We didn’t feel like we were done with Oslo, but there was an art workshop in Bergen on Saturday that we didn’t want to miss. And we had a lot of ground to cover in between. So on our third day in Norway, we started our DIY Norway in a Nutshell tour.
Norway in a Nutshell
If you spend any time at all planning a trip to Norway, you’ll run across the Norway in a Nutshell tour. Like the Golden Circle in Iceland, it’s a roughly defined loop in the southern part of the country with a few popular tourist attractions that have been built up into “you haven’t been there if you missed this” status. The Norway version usually involves Oslo and Bergen, the rail line in between, a fjord tour, and the Flåmsbana train ride. People do it in either direction, and sometimes only one way. Most people take two days to complete it, but you can cram it into one (minus the return trip) or stretch it to a whole vacation, depending on how much ground you want to cover each day.
Why I DIY
There’s a tour company that runs Norway in a Nutshell, but the thing is, they really only serve as a booking agent. They don’t provide guides or the actual transportation. They do offer a lot of different variations on the itinerary, but their website was kind of confusing for me. Then I found a website that broke down the steps and the cost of a self-planned Nutshell. Booking the “official” tour cost nearly twice as much as planning your own trip and buying minipris tickets or using a Eurail pass. I was already planning on a Eurail pass, so DIY seemed like the obvious way to go.
A Rocky Start
We arrived at the Eurail office just as they were closing on Wednesday night. They activated our passes, but said we needed a seat reservation to ride the Bergen line – something that was not obvious on the Eurail or NSB web sites. We had to come back in the morning since they had already turned off their POS system. Like a dork, I stressed out about making it to the station on time to get our seats and make the train, so I got insomnia and slept a total of 3 hours that night. Because a sleepless night is the best way to guarantee smooth travel.
Catching the Train
Since I was up early (you know, 2 am) we got there in plenty of time. We reserved our seats, bought our discounted Flåmsbana tickets (Eurail Pass holders get 30% off the private rail line) and made it to the platform, which was almost adjacent to the office, with about 40 minutes to spare before our 8:25 train. We found our seats, stowed our stuff, and fell asleep before we were out of the Oslo suburbs. We slept through half of the six hour train ride to Myrdal through some of the most gorgeous scenery known to mankind and I still managed to use up all the data on my prepaid sim card.
Flåmsbana
The Flåm Railway runs from the mountaintop at Myrdal down to
the village of Flåm on the Sognefjord (you know, the fjord where Egil
Skallagrimsson’s family came from). It is one of the world’s steepest railways
on normal track. It’s only 12.4 miles long but has a half-mile vertical elevation
drop and some famous tunnels and super-twisty bits. It’s definitely an
engineering feat if you’re in to that, but people are mainly attracted to it
for the chance to see world-class mountain views from inside a photogenic historic
train car.
In fact, the train stops barely five minutes out of Myrdal
to let people off to take pictures of a waterfall. The waterfall wasn’t running
much since the snowpack hadn’t started melting yet when we were there in
mid-April, but it was still a beautiful place to go camera crazy.
The rest of the ride only takes about an hour, which most
people spend obsessively trying to grab Instagram shots. Unfortunately, that
means they keep the windows down, and you know, old trains are really loud,
especially in tunnels. My daughter and eye spent as much time with our hands
over our ears as our fingers on the shutters.
But that’s okay, it was still a ride on a cool old train,
and the mountains were still drop dead gorgeous. For all that the engineering
talk, the train ride didn’t feel particularly vertiginous compared to the funicular
we would later ride in Bergen, or remotely scary compared to the bus rides I
took on mountain roads when I was in India. In other words, it wasn’t a thrill
ride; it was easy to relax and enjoy the views.
The Village of Flåm
Flåm is a tiny village of about 300 people. It mostly consists of gift shops and restaurants clustered around a tourist information center. We hit up the TIC first to confirm our boat tickets for the morning. I wasted time looking for a sim card at the only tiny grocery store in town, then promptly got lost looking for the campground where we had reserved a cabin.
But even in the middle of dragging suitcases around trying to figure out where we were going, my daughter relaxed as soon as we got off the train. I hadn’t realized that she was tense when we were running around Oslo. But something about that tiny strip of photogenic land inside the bowl-like enclosure of mountains on the edge of the fjord put her immediately at ease.
Cozy Cabins
Once we found it (and there was no reason we had such a hard time), we loved our little cabin. My daughter was delighted to discover that she could have both the top and bottom bunks for herself, and I just loved how cozy it was.
By the time we walked back into town, everyone from our train had disappeared and the town seemed almost deserted. We shopped at the gift shops until they closed (most of them at 4 o’clock). I got a thulite pendant and we bought some locally made chocolate. Then we hung around until the brewery opened for dinner.
We had an excellent dinner and walked back to cabin in the
dusk (the sun disappeared behind the mountains hours before the actual “sunset”).
There I failed to properly operate the washing machine, so I gave up and spent
a peaceful evening relaxing with a local brew in the cabin while my daughter read
a book in her bunk. We went to sleep early and had the first solid night’s rest
of the trip.
Visit Flåm
Despite the almost complete lack of activity – or maybe because of it – we were seriously tempted to stay longer. I could easily have spent a day just soaking in the quiet, and then hung around for a couple days more with day trips to Stegastein and the nearby village of Aurland (where Egil’s in-laws lived). I guess I’m not surprised that my artsy introvert wanted more time in Flåm. But I’m all about concerts and museums and fancy coffee, and I still felt weirdly at home in that tiny little town where you have to look up to see the horizon.
