Ålesund: Your mileage may vary

You know how fast food looks so much better in the ad than on your plate? Well, travel delivers a lot of similar experiences.

That's Ålesund as showcased on visitnorway.com.

And that's me on an overcast, drizzly day in actual Ålesund.

Our last day on Bukkholmen, our island in Langevåg, across the fjord, starts out grey, so we make for shore in our little boat and pile in the car for a trip to picturesque Ålesund, the famous Art Nouveau town. I'd built up the trip for months with tourist photos of the colorful Jugendstil architecture. The girls no doubt were imagining themselves sipping expertly made capuccino in immaculately Euro-stylish coffee shops, watching cosmopolitan Euro-sophisticates glide past.

I was more concerned about finding a parking spot, and also not putting dings in our brand new car. Space in Norwegian cities and towns like Ålesund is tight, don't you know. When we finally made our way into a parking garage, after a lot of traffic lights, several wrong turns, and some swearing, I learned to appreciate the 360° camera: If clearances are tight out on the street, parking in this particular garage felt like trying to turn a river barge in the kiddie pool. The Volvo's cameras and proximity alerts dialed what would otherwise have been a pucker factor of at least six down to a two.

Out on the street, you can't help notice, in Norwegian cities and towns on grey days, how much grey there is: Grey sidewalks and grey asphalt or cobbles, divided by grey edging stones in gneiss or other local igneous stone.

At first, we had a spot of trouble finding this fabled view from the tourist photos.

We were literally standing between the blue and yellow building, wondering where the hell that colorful harbor scenery could have gone. That's because the view from that side looks like this:

That's the side where you usually take those neat photos from, and you can't actually see the cool façades when you're on the other side, the side we were on. You do have a good view of Aksla, Fjellstua viewpoint — the white building at the top — and the zig-zag staircase that'll get you there (unless you cheat and drive, which you can; there's an access road on the other side of the hill).

We opted not to take the stairs, both because in the interest of time and because I was hauling 30 lbs of little girl on my back. Instead, we wandered the streets for a bit …

… and had some lunch and soft-serve ice cream at Brokiosken, itself a bit of an institution, sitting as it does right smack in the middle of the tourist path and serving up some excellent freshly made cod fish'n'chips with secret-recipe batter.

The soft-serve is probably the bit our kids will remember of Ålesund. Don't get me wrong, now — Ålesund is a pleasant town, and the architecture is unique. On a sunny day, it would have been beautiful. This being Norway, however, your odds of that are at best 50-50.

If I were going back to Ålesund, and if you were considering visiting, here's my lesson and takeaway: Don't just blow through in a few hours and expect to see the glamorous views you've been fed online. Give it some time. If we'd had a few days in Ålesund proper, we would have had at least one sunny day, and we would have taken the time to go up on Aksla for the view, visit the aquarium, and poked around some of the quieter streets off the tourist path. Ålesund is a pleasant and pretty little city. It just deserves to be seen on a better day and with more than a few hours to scratch the surface.