9/3/2003
Dominick A. Miserandino

Geiranger

I hate tenders. They're not necessarily tender things. If you're not aware of what a tender is, they're little boats (like glorified life boats) that sail you to the dock. Fortunately, this ship doesn't need to tender much, but in this case it did.

It's not that I'm scared of the water or anything. The tender was pretty big so there was nothing to be scared of. It's the waiting. You see the dock. You see the place you're going, but the tender is small and slow, and you feel as if you're watching the longest movie preview every made.

We were arriving in Geiranger. We were here to see the mountain summer farm where they made the most incredible goat cheese. However, it's hard to even start the adventure without describing where we were.

One of the Farm's Goats Posing for a Picture

We were in a fjord. A rather deep fjord. A rather large fjord. The pictures don't do this fjord justice. You feel alone. You feel small. It reminds me of the Grand Canyon, but filled with water.

Geiranger is the most beautiful fjord, (in my humble fjord-expertise opinion), so I spun around a few times just to get a grip on it.

The ride to the farm takes an hour, but probably would take about six minutes if it wasn't for the hills. You have to make about eight or nine turns, weaving and....Well, more weaving, up the mountain, just to get to the road.Just getting to the top of the mountain took about 15 minutes and was worthy of a rest and a picture.

You ride further and then you pull up to a farm. I've described the houses covered with grass before, well, here's a whole field of them. The farm is up in the mountains, but actually surrounded by mountains, giving you the impression of being in a valley. Also, it's not a farm as I was expecting, with a tractor and fields of wheat, but a goat farm. Goats are everywhere. They pride themselves on their brown goat cheese and they sell it pretty inexpensively.

It doesn't take long to see the whole farm and get the entire tour. This is a good thing in this case. It gives you a chance to spin around and look at the mountains. There are waterfalls in the mountains, clouds floating by, goats running crazy through the fields. It takes at least another hour to absorb your surroundings and get used to the goats braying.

We spent some of the time wandering around the farm and exploring the Viking ruins. The ruins look just like a big pile of rocks, but they insist that they're very historic.