There is limited choice to what one can do on the non walking day during this particular holiday. There was no need to visit Bergen as we would have half a day there on departure day and the local bus service would be needed if individuals wished to go elsewhere on their day off.

Accordingly 16 of us opted to take the excursion kindly organised by our leaders to Ulvik, even at the cost of about £38 each. The itinery for this would include a ride up to a mountain top, a visit to an art gallery and time spent in Ulvik. The minibus took us via Voss to Ulvik on the Hardanger fjord. This struck us a very clean & tidy little town and it had an interesting wooden church.

Then we drove another 12 miles to find the Hjadlane art gallery at Osa. High above the Hardanger fjord, scattered amongst the trees this hamlet consists of just a few houses, the largest of which was the artist Polden's gallery. His son was in attendance and he kindly served up coffee for us with an honesty box for payment. The pictures on display can only be described as "weird" so were not to everybody's taste, but in general it was the landscapes that were better received.

We then undertook a short search for a well known sculpture "The Stream Nest" which was relocated to somewhere near the gallery from Lillehammer, it having been commissioned for the Winter Olympic Games held there in 1994. Despite being constructed from 3000 logs and 20000 bricks, we were unable to find it, the assumption being that it had become engulfed by the undergrowth. Finding this picture of it on the left from the Internet was somewhat easier. See a larger one. Many thanks to the photographer Ann Cleeves.

Finally we set out for our mountain top. An honesty box toll road started from near the Osa gallery and worked its way up the mountain side with tight hairpin bends and associated awesome drops. Eventually, after running past large patches of snow we reached a very desolate but more or less level area which had to be our terminus. However at that moment heavy rain began so nobody was much inclined to explore very far. Had they done so they might have encountered one of Norway's many hydro-electric power stations, but from where we were we could not even see the necessary large lake to drive it. However we could see a large stony embankment which was probably something to do with it. On the downward journey we were lucky enough to spot a heron which amazed us as it was hard to imagine his fish prey managing to eke out a living in such fast flowing streams.