Day 13

Miles walked: 9.1

Segard Hoel to Gumdal Gard

Cost: 350

Day 14, Also a Gumdal Gard, rest day

The closer place was booked, so we had 30 km to get to our hotel, 18 miles, and we worried we could never make it so we agreed to hitchhike at Meldal, 9 km away. We got bites immediately, all from older men, alone. One guy said he just wanted to know what we were doing, and was not really going anywhere, another said he would be right back, and the final successful ‘bite’ was out fishing. He had a cute Norwegian Moose dog in the trunk and his car was filled with gear. He threw it all in the trunk and gave us a ride to Svorkmo. 

The exciting news was that there was a restaurant! There are shockingly few in rural Norway. No bars, no clubs, no liquor stores, no restaurants. We hatched a plan: eat out tonight1 Buy groceries for a few days in case we decide to spent two nights at Gumdal Gard, but have dinner out one night. 

It was a great plan, but it was a three km walk uphill to get to our hostel. That was tough enough with all of our groceries. we roughed it up the hill...it was steep and a slow walk. The accommodation turned out to be very nice, with a lovely kitchen and beer in the fridge. And the owner, a real sweetheart offered to take us to the restaurant. We ended up walking down and he picked us up.

It was nice to have non-home cooked with limited ingredient food for a change.

Gumdal Gard is a dairy farm and he supplements his income with running the hostel. He also has another cabin rented out to a fisherman for the summer. His wife is Thai. We got to observe the dairy farm activities pretty closely because we stayed two nights so we were hanging around the property all day. The milking process is surprisingly manual. I remember visiting a dairy farm as a child where the cows were milked in a row, all at once with gleaming milking apparatus. This farm had only three milkers, so the cows had to wait their turns. The weather was quite cold during our visit and he kept all of the cows indoors. We felt pretty sorry for them. I think our host is more of an old school farmer. It is hard to get the cows back in the barn once you let them out, and I can see why.

Milking old school style

Get us out of here

We also learned about robotic milkers. So there are robots who can milk cows. They are hideously expensive, so few farmers have them. This is the deal: the cows come into the barn to be milked by the robot when they’re ready. And because milk production is based on supply and demand, the cows also produce more milk with a robotic milker. It is a way to make a very inhumane business a little less cruel, it is unfortunate they are so expensive.

It is remarkable that these small farms exist in Norway. we see so little of it in the United States, I think because our government supports big farmers. It is expensive to subsidize farming, but even more expensive to subsidize little farms.

Our rest day was interrupted by the German invasion and indeed we are still under seige. Did I mention that 905 of walkers on this trail are German or Austrian? Four folks stayed at our little house and took up a lot of room. There are only six beds, and now there were seven people. We ate our dinner at 4:30 as they watched and continued to fill up the room. Then we had no where to go so we had to go up to bed at 6:30. We’ll that was fine with me, I was still exhausted.

The partying continued until midnight which kept Laura and Carolyn awake, but not me. You see there was beer.

Carolyn, our host, and me