I often think about the friends I made back in college. We had some pretty wild and crazy times, and I’m fortunate to still be able to keep up with some of them, although not as much as I’d like. There are a lot of triggers that make me think about The Good Times, not the least of which is my Wall O’ Photos opposite my desk at home. However, there’s probably nobody I think about during the time when I’m at work than my friend Tory, and that’s not just because his name’s on the toilets.
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| I bless the rains down in AFFFFFricAAAAAAAAA… |
But seriously, the real reason I’m reminded of Tory is that a large number of pictures in my computer’s desktop slideshow both at home and at work are from places that I wound up visiting almost entirely due to his recommendations.
Tory’s always been a very savvy traveler. Although we do kid him about the fact that he only owns one shirt, he’s managed to put together some truly spectacular expeditions to very good at planning out fantastic expeditions to places throughout Europe.
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| In all fairness, who doesn’t like Cheerwine? |
So when I found out that I would be attending a research conference in Finland in the summer of 2010, I saw it as an opportunity to have a Scandinavian adventure - and I knew that I needed to sit down with Tory and get some advice. Tory told me about all the places he’d been to, from his time wandering throughout Oslo to ski trips out in Stryn. However, the one place that he seemed to highlight was a tiny town on the Songenfjord in Norway called Flåm.
And so based entirely on Tory’s recommendation, on the second day of my trip I found myself on the overnight train traveling westward from Oslo Central Station towards Flåm, some 200+ miles in the wrong direction from Finland. Flåm, pronounced like the weird Nickelodeon-marketed substance floam from my childhood (which they apparently still make?), is a town of about 450 people which is really quite difficult to get to. To access the town by car from Oslo, you either have to make the arduous journey through the mountains of central Norway or you have to use the Laerdal Tunnel, which at 15.2 miles is the longest vehicular tunnel in the world.
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| The tunnel is 4 miles longer than the next longest road tunnel, so they decided to put in several artificial caves inside the tunnel so you can rest your legs and your brain. (photo from Wikimedia Commons) |
However, the trip is totally worth it. The reason Flåm is so difficult to get to is the reason it is such a fantastic place to visit, since the village is nestled in a valley at the head of the Aurlandsfjord, deep in Norway’s spectacular fjord country. It really doesn’t matter whether you’re looking up at the towering cliffs from a tour boat, gazing across the valley from an impressive vista on a mountainside trail, or marveling at the innumerable waterfalls as you make the steep descent down the spur rail line into town on a specially designed train – there simply isn’t a bad view to be found.
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| The Myrdal train station is simply dwarfed by this absolutely fantastic waterfall... and you're just sitting there reading a book like you're on the Washington Metro? What the heck is wrong with you, lady? |
And so once again, I took Tory’s example before me and went photo-mad, using up multiple sets of batteries in a single 24-hour period in my vain attempt to make my brief stay in Flåm last longer through film. Just check out how I blabber on about the trip in my extraordinarily lengthy blog entry (scroll down to June 4 for some pictures of the place and the story of how I spent 5 hours asleep on the floor of a train station in the middle of nowhere to make a transfer to the Flåm railway).
I really would love to show you all a bunch of photos about the things I saw in Flåm and the hike I took (again, at Tory’s suggestion) from Aurland at sea level up to Prest Peak at 4,460’… but as I just said, I’ve already written about it once. The fact is that the place has had a lasting impact on me – hardly a week goes by that I don’t have some kind of fond memory about meeting the ill-prepared Japanese tourists getting drenched at the base of the Kjelfossen waterfall or following the hiking trail through a field past a picturesque yet decrepit barn or of how the oppresively overcast conditions broke through to sun just as I crested the ridge and got my first view of the fjord from above. It really was that spectacular of a place.
Granted, part of the reason why I think about those experiences so much is because these and other pictures from Flåm show up with great frequency on the desktop background slideshows of my various computers. Since I deliberately pick every photo that shows up in my desktop slideshows, that got me thinking: I can use the distribution of pictures in my desktop slideshow to quantify just how spectacular the Aurlandsfjord really is.
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| Sometimes there are simply no words on it. (photo: Wikimedia Commons; link: very NSFW) |
The pictures from my trip to Flåm make up a whopping 14.4% of the photos in my desktop slideshow, which is all the more impressive when you realize that I was only in town for a 22-hour period in June 2010 – approximately 0.010% of my life. If we assume that the photos I’ve selected to be in the slideshow (and they go back many, many years) give a good sampling of the things I choose to remember from my life, then I took photos in Flåm at a rate that was 1,593 times as high as the rate at which I normally take noteworthy photos.
The simple conclusion that I draw from this data is that Flåm is about 1,600 times more picturesque than the average place on Earth – and that’s why you should always listen to Tory whenever he tells you to do anything.
