Norway Road Trip Stop 5: A near-emergency stop under Dalsnibba | Adventure Every Day

Mom and I had rented a car back in Oslo. There's a great service in Norway called Nabobil (neighbor car) that allows anyone to rent out their personal vehicles to strangers. I guess this exists in some other places, but I've used it a bunch here, and it works really well.

And it was working really well on this trip, too, for the first 24 hours at least.

We has already crossed over the mountain passes in the middle of Norway, which aren't necessarily all that high, but due to the long, cold, dark winters, it sometimes feels like you have left earth for another planet.

Here's an example of what it can look like:

We'd made it through long stretches of this without any trouble whatsoever, and I was driving especially carefully, both because we were renting the car and because mom isn't a fan of narrow, curvy mountain roads, to put it mildly. (I personally find it thrilling on crazy roads, but I certainly didn't want to ruin the trip for my guest!)

Nothing up to the valley below the Dalsnibba viewpoint was too treacherous, but then we were coming up to our first crazy switchback, which looks like this.

Shouldn't be a problem under normal conditions, and I was already planning to take it slow for mom's sake, but literally after we turned the corner on the first switchback is when the noise started and the brakes began to feel weird.

Seriously?

We turned one more corner, and the condition seemed to get slightly worse.

I'm usually pretty calm and nonchalant about this kind of stuff, but this was legitimately concerning, enough so that we pulled off to the side of the road to investigate, as visions of tumbling uncontrollably down the mountainside flashed through our minds.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty clueless when it comes to car repairs, so I didn't really know what to look for, and after some searching around, I really didn't see anything that looked abnormal.

I was still worried, but also realized that this was a great time to snag a couple quick photos of the lush and beautiful valley below:

Since I couldn't find anything and there isn't exactly anyone to call in such a remote area, it seemed we didn't really have much choice but to push on at as slow of a pace as possible.

Would we make it to Geiranger at the very bottom of this stretch of the road, or was the whole trip about to crash and burn? Drop by tomorrow's post to find out!