Visiting Herdla

Honeymoon in Norway Day 6

I see many fellow travel writers give the advice of “you shouldn’t plan every single day” and “you should just get out there to explore and let the adventure take you to places”. Personally, for my holidays, I disagree with this advice. If I have only 10 days to spend in a foreign country, I want to make the best of it and just go out and see what will happen to me seems like a recipe for wasting time. Our sixth day on our Norway honeymoon was a reminder of why I have this opinion and why I usually plan every day meticulously.

When I was planning our honeymoon, my husband asked me “take it easy” on the planning, “we don’t need to do something every day” he said, “let us get some rest”.

I kept that in mind while planning (although it was hard) and so I left day 6 open. The previous day we had a hike planned, which was quite a full day and the day after we had to drive to Hovland. Fine then, let’s take it easy.

We woke up in the morning, had breakfast, and then we looked at all the brochures we had from the hotel for something calm and nearby. Maybe take the car and have a drive around?

The only thing we found that was fitting those requirements was visiting the village of Herdla.

Herdla is a small, flat island just a 50 minutes drive from Bergen. It is known for its beaches, museums, fishing places, golf course, windsurfing, and kiting, and for its German-built fort from World War II.

We would drive there to enjoy the surroundings, see what the museum was about (had a WWII aircraft on display and my husband is obsessed with everything aviation), and then have an enjoyable walk around.

We arrived in Herdla, and our first stop was to visit the tiny museum. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a miss. Not only it was super small but also most of the exhibition wasn’t translated into English.

They dedicated one part of the museum to children’s storybook monsters from a Norwegian author and the second part was about the history of Herdla, especially during WWII. What a weird mix…

The most interesting item was the German fighter aircraft Yellow-16 plane that fell into the sea and was recently recovered and restored 64 years later for the public to enjoy.

They also have a nice short film on how the plane was found, recovered and restored, but again it was only in Norwegian, so we had to guess the story from the images and videos.

We had a quick lunch at the museum cafeteria. Nice and calm. Then we walked around the area and enjoyed nature and the view. It was nice, but I’ll be honest, it wasn’t the most exciting place we visited. Didn’t help that it was quite windy too, which made the walk less enjoyable.

And that was Herdla .

We made our way back to Bergen. We then wander on the streets and then we looked for a place to have dinner. Bergen is very popular and touristy and once again we didn’t book a table. Which meant we really struggled to find a nice place to eat. We ended up discovering a place away from the centre and the crowd, which was exactly what we were after. However; the place felt a little sketchy. They didn’t have a menu in English so we had to google translate it to order food.

We both had the fish with carrot purée, potato and cabbage. Was actually pretty tasty and finally, we ate local food.

As requested by my husband, it was a calm day with nothing crazy planned. Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel that it was a failed day. The story of Heldra was interesting (what we could understand) but don’t think it was worth it. Specially when you only have two weeks to spend in Norway.

I wished I had planned something in advance. Could still have been a small and calm visit, yet something that I would have researched and worth our time.

Lesson learnt! Next time I will thoroughly plan every day like I normally do. That doesn’t mean we can’t deviate from the plan, of course, but at least have a list of well-researched places to visit. And book a bloody restaurant in advance!

This was are day visiting Heldla

If you missed my previous post check it here: Cruising through Mofjorden & Hiking Mt Slottet

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