Last stop on the Norway leg of the tour. Bergen is a gorgeous town at the foot of some of the Norwegian hills. We have also reached the end of a 5 show back-to-back stretch. The show tonight will have to be celebrated with a beer afterwards!
Getting to the show was a little bit of a mess. We Googled the distance to the spot and decided we needed a taxi. It turns out that it was located only a few blocks from our hotel and we ended up wasting fifty bucks on a van taxi for everybody. Oh well, it’s getting to the point where we feel more focused on surviving the tour than counting each penny. Or 5000 of them.
The show was on the college campus and they had transformed an outdoor area and some of the campus into a venue. The food here was particularly good! I think they brought in some of the culinary students for catering and it was where most of the crew would hang out!
The show was fun but for the first time we experienced a crowd showing up late. I assume the bar out front attributed to that, but as we got into it, the place filled up. The show went off in the pseudo-outdoor venue and we wandered out afterwards to sell albums in the corner of the bar. As was the case in the rest of Norway, the location of the merch table was crucial and we got caught behind the bar crowd. Sales were ok but on the bright side we inherited a decent amount of beer from the dressing rooms for our day off.
We hit a couple bars and experienced the strangest example of the life of an opening band. In a smaller college town we were recognized and felt mildly famous. But in the literal poverty of independent musicians, we snuck a few beers into bars to avoid the ~$20 Norwegian drink cost. Not quite the bottle service you hope for on the road to fame!
The next day I slept in and took a hike up the hill to get a few great pictures of the town. The sun was out and the people were friendly. Good way to close out Norway.
