Bergtatt, Marvellous Marble Mine
A chandelier in the marble mine that we would be visiting.
The bridge across the entrance to Kristiansund.
The stone circle where king Harald Fairhair swore to unite Norway, which at the time was a divided area with chieftains and minor kings governing just their own area. He was in love with a beautiful women, the daughter of a rich family but her response to his proposal of marriage was that she would only marry the king of Norway,
Harald Fairhair swore an oath in that stone circle tat he would not shave his beard or cut his hair until he had united Norway. He set about his task and by 885AD he had united the country and married his love.
A memorial to lives lost at sea.
And then it was the main event for which the Atlantic Road is so well known, the bridge and road that featured in the James Bond film, No Time to Die.
No need for any text...just pictures, poor quality as the light was behind the bridge and failing fast.
There is a coastal path around the island at the eastern end of the bridge but it only takes 15 minutes to amble around the island.
...and a picture of the road disappearing into the sky.
The view from the coach at the top of the bridge looking down at two more islands and two more bridges before reaching the mainland. The cost of this bridge was recovered far quicker than expected due to the number of tourists visiting it.
On one stormy night, the weather was so rough that it destroyed the toll booth and the locals were delighted to have toll free access for a week until the booth was reinstated.
After our soup, we watched a documentary film of work in the marble mine and the use of explosives to break down the solid rock to manageable rubble. The tunnels are wide and high for the giant Caterpillar trucks and bulldozers to move the marble to the crushers. Most of the marble mined here is for use in the paper industry to produce those glossy magazines. Only when they receive an order for a block of marble to be cut and polished into chandeliers or furniture do they have to carefully extract a block of marble.
At the end of the tour, we rebounded the coach and drove out of the mine and back along the road to reach Molde, the city of roses. It was English nobility the first saw the roses grown here so far north. The Gulf stream runs past Molde and gives it just the right climate for growing roses and they called it the City of Roses and the name stuck.
Molde is also known as the city of literature as Norways first Nobel prize winner for literature came from here. It is also known as the city of jazz as there is a big jazz festival in July every year with artists performing from all over the world. So much going on for a town that I hadn't heard of before.
We passed the statue of a women with a basket, the Flower Woman. During the summer, her basket is filled with fresh roses. We were dropped off at the harbour and we saw our ship come into port and berth. We went aboard as some passengers and some of the crew who had finished their tour of duty got off and in no time at all, we were on our way.
