Dear Visitor

My name is Vebjørn Fiksdal. I am 59 years old, Norwegian, married, and have 3 grown-up boys.

By profession I am bus driver in the Nettbuss company.

I have a lot of interests, and my number one is my homepage. I use a lot of time writing and photographing, and I do believe my site is improving each day, week and month.

I am a collector of old stuff, like glass fishing floats, old photos from my homeplace, postcards, nautical items, and a lot of other things.

I also have some experience in genealogy, and in time I will make pages with information and sources about it for those of you who is interested.

My home place

I live in the coastal countryside, in Fiksdal, a small village in Møre and Romsdal County, with around 500 inhabitants.

Learn more about Fiksdal

I was born in Fiksdal, and have lived here for most of my life. The coastal environment has always attracted me, and my fascination for the ocean, the sea and the fjords will be there forever.

How it started.

Once I found some old glass fishing floats in my grandfathers boathouse. These are very common in any old, Norwegian boathouse, but I decided to put one or two up on an eBay auction.

I was contacted by collectors from USA (I really had no idea this was an item for collectors), and this started me reading and doing research about old glass floats. It turned out that Norwegian floats was the oldest floats in the world. In fact Norway produced floats from 1840, while the first "foreign" floats was not produced until early 1900's.

I started my own homepage with a lot of information about the Norwegian fishing floats, and also made it a sales page for the old floats.

After some time, people from all over the world started asking me questions about Norway.

About the weather, about Norwegian names, the fjords, the Royal family and a lot of other interesting themes.

I actually found it interesting to answer them too, and I learned a lot from this myself.

So eventually I decided to change my focus from Glass Fishing Floats, to Travel Information about Norway.

The "Your Travel Guide to Norway" site

Some years ago "my" bus-company had a contract with the Norwegian "Hurtigruten Company" to take their passengers from Geiranger over the Trollstigen to Molde, where they again entered the ship. I learned a lot that time, both about foreign tourists, and about the Hurtigruten. As a bus driver you get in touch with a lot of people, learn their FAQ so to say.

I learned that many of them had put a lot of effort in research before their travel, but were confused by not finding the information they wanted. Passengers on the Hurtigruten wanted to know a little about the harbours they were visiting. But not too much either. A lot of travel sites are confusing by giving you hundreds of links to explore, so I decided I wanted to do it simple.

Day by day I keep building it, adding new content and updating. In time I will be able to give you the short version information about all the harbours in the Hurtigruten route, and even give you recommendations to hotels, restaurants and what to see in each of the places.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line?

I love my country, and that's the main reason for sharing my knowledge about Norway with all of you.

I do not work in the travel industry, and has no professional interest in it, so just take it from a Natural Born Norwegian.

I do not know everything, but I use a lot of time exploring Norwegian sites to find what you might want to know. Putting myself in your shoes I try to understand what you want, and need, to know, the same way I would have wanted if I was visiting Your country.

If you like it I hope you will come back to it, and I hope you will tell others about it.

About making my homepage

As many others, I really struggled with my old homepage. I was not an HTML-man, and building pages was not easy at all.

I knew I had to change my working method, and searched the net for alternatives....

In my opinion 99% of the suppliers are only going for your money, and when they have got that there is no more. I must I admit I did my misjudgements.

I am not pushing you into anything here, but IF you consider starting your own homepage, I recommend you to

read about SBI and what they are offering you.

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