Let me take a few moments to tell you about Steve’s car. A twelve year old white Volvo SUV, built like a small tank, and at the time of our adventure, just a week’s worth of normal family life away from rolling through three hundred thousand kilometres on the clock. I’ve driven plenty of different cars in my life, so many holiday rentals and all manner of makes and models, but until now, never a Volvo. And a lovely car it is too, with its higher than average view of the road, a six speed gearbox and the reassuring comfort with which it will take you on a nine hour journey as beyond the windscreen, the hauntingly beautiful Scandinavian landscape steadily rolls by. Steve’s family like their Volvos so much that they have two of them parked outside their sprawling pile on the west coast of Sweden. The newer one that we travelled in for the first couple of days in the area around my host’s home is a fairly recent addition to the fleet, but he confided that he prefers the old one. “We’ll be going to Norway in the white one,” he nodded. “It’s got a bigger tank and we might just get away without needing to refuel it in Norway if we fill it to the brim at Charlottenburg before we cross the border.” I nodded, enjoying the novelty of being dragged along by the coat tails rather than planning every inch of the adventure obsessively as I usually do.
When my time to drive the Volvo arrived, pretty much in conjunction with Steve’s unfortunate and well documented knee related episode, it was with no small degree of trepidation. I’m used to getting to grips with an unfamiliar dashboard and controls in funny places, but never before when the owner of the car has been sitting right next to me in the passenger seat. My own car is almost as old as his, but I know how I’d feel if someone else were clunking through its gears uncertainly as I sat beside them. And then there was the electric handbrake. Lee and I took three days to get our heads around the world of electric handbrakes and push button starts when we hired a big Renault in Iceland three years ago, but then again a blind wombat with three legs could drive around Iceland without getting into trouble - as long as it’s summer and their guide dog isn’t goggling at the landscape too much when they should be barking to announce the odd passing car.
By now I’d driven the car down to Otta, the local town at the bottom of the mountain, where Steve spent a tidy sum on a knee support that seemed to be almost as robust as the Volvo, before we headed back up the steep road and through the toll barrier to the small car park beside the lake. For a while we took photographs there, before moving on at our own paces. From here it was a mile or so to the twin waterfalls of Storulfossen along the path, and when I paused to roll off a few more lakeside shots, Steve continued on, just to get ahead as he was sure that with two correctly functioning knees I’d catch him up before long.
I never did catch him up. As I wandered along the path, stopping every ten yards to swivel my head at the jaw dropping three hundred and sixty degree views and pointing the camera indiscriminately at a lot of things both near and far, my phone suddenly buzzed into life. Steve was ringing. Petra had just called him from home to let him know that I wasn’t even capable of locking the car correctly, never mind driving the thing. She knew this because - believe it or not - the app had told her the car was unlocked. An app! And a twelve year old car for goodness sake! I didn’t even know this was a thing. Had the Volvo been designed by NASA or CERN, I wondered? And what’s more, I knew I’d locked the car. He’d seen me doing it, and if the wing mirrors fold in as well, then surely that’s the belt, the braces and a safety pin as well isn’t it? Certain that nobody else was around to make off with it, I abandoned the camera on the tripod in the middle of the path and ran almost half a mile back to the car, which of course was locked. I’d known all along it was locked. I’d just try the door though. Heck, it opened! What’s all that about? I clunked the remote to lock it again, but still it opened. But if I didn’t know by now that it was one of those “clever” cars that automatically unlocked itself when the person with the key approached it, I was never going to learn. I locked it again, this time from as far away as possible, messaged Steve, told him that the car was definitely locked and the wing mirrors were absolutely folded in, and ran back along the path to where I’d left the camera. There it was, standing on its tripod, waiting for my return. As far as I know, there isn’t an app that tells me whether someone’s pinched it.
Meanwhile, Steve was happily snapping away beside the waterfall, grabbing the light as it danced from one lone silver birch dressed in autumn colours to the next. Hmmm, I’ve seen his pictures, and you probably have too. Wondering what he was up to? Suspicious about a twelve year old car that’s been around the world six times really having an “app?” Yes, I can’t help feeling there were Machiavellian tactics at hand too. Obviously he didn’t want me getting in on the action did he? Come on Steve, we all know your game!
At least the sneaky plot to derail my afternoon didn’t spring into action before I rattled off a few shots here and there. I may have arrived at the waterfall some time after him, but I did at least manage to find a few things to photograph along the way. Much like that blind Icelandic motoring wombat, it’s difficult to get things wrong in a place like this.
