Saved by a mountain of meat and cheese

Trixie saved our lives. Or, at least, our sanity.

Some time around one, the whole bedraggled crew is stuffing itself, warm and cozy, from a table covered in food: Pizza, fries, and shawarma at Trixie Kebab and Pizza in tiny Trofors. Trofors is actually a pleasant place with an awesome waterfall, but we're not paying attention to anything right now because we're hungry, tired, and pissed.

We'd left Torghatten cold, hungry, and demoralized that morning. The only one who didn't have a miserable night was Mia, whose superpower is sleeping right through whatever misery nature throws at her. As for the rest of us … The kids' tent turned out to be leaky, and they'd shivered through the night in moist sleeping bags. Ours, the lightproof wonder we'd been so excited about, was not advertised as windproof. Come to find out why all the other campers we've seen use these little mountaineering tubelike things: All night, the wind grabbed big fistfulls of tend and pushed the walls in on us. Traci got the worst of it, having picked (or did I?) the side of the mattress closest to the wall. She'd slept almost nothing. Being smothered in tent every ten minutes will do that.

So, we had hauled ass out of there, dropped the tents off at the local thrift store (no, really — unceremoniously and with no regrets), and sworn we'd never tent again.

We were hungry, tired, and probably grubby. I don't even remember if we took the time to shower or brush our teeth that morning. Now we have to make our way back to the mainland and the E6 so we can book it to Bodø and Saltstraumen. Traci is having no part of driving today, going as she is on no sleep.

I can't honestly say if that road from Brønnøysund to E6 is any more windy, but Christ on the tricycle does it feel like it. For the next two hours it just doesn't let up. I feel like gunning the white whale and powering through the curves at irresponsible speeds just to get through, but Traci is not in the mood for any excessive g-forces today. (Actually never, but let's just not go there.) An hour and a half in, I feel as it this is just not ever going to end, and we're condemned to infinite loops along the fjords forever.

Two hours of this. Or, at least, if felt like two hours.

That's when Traci saves the day. “OK, that's it,” she says. “We're eating out, and I'm buying.”

Translation: Fuck being frugal. We're miserable. And that's how she finds Trixie, Googling for places to eat. “Half hour away,” she says. “Looks alright. Pizza and kebab?”

Pizza and kebab?

Yes, and let's digress for second. We need to talk about this. You see, in Norway, that's not a weird combination at all. First, pizza is popular, and it's actually pretty good, even in places you wouldn't expect it. Second, “kebab” is also popular fast food. This is not what you'd think of as kebab in the U.S., though, or most anywhere else for that matter. It's not actually kebab but what in English we'd call shawarma or gyro, wrapped in pita bread with a heap of iceberg lettuce, a pint of mayonnaise-based “kebab saus” or Thousand Island dressing, and a bunch of canned corn (Norwegians love canned corn). The better places give you sliced beef, marinated and then seared on a griddle; the less-good places give you that sliced “gyro” mean that's basically a vaguely Mediterranean-flavored meat loaf.

No, really, this is a thing.

Consider where we are, and the combo isn't so weird anymore: Most of Norway is small towns. Plus, Norwegians don't eat out a lot. We don't have a huge go-out-to-eat culture. We're frugal, and going out to eat is frivolous, dammit. So you have all these small towns with not a lot of customers to begin with, and most of them don't eat out much — it's hard to get enough traffic for one place to make a living, let alone multiple. So what does that one place in town do? Serve up everything. People like pizza, and they like kebab? OK, make that. Also, do they like pølse (hot dog)? Add that to the menu. Hamburgers? Løvstek (very thin, cheap beef steak)? Sure!

And so it is with Trixie; the menu has everything. Pizzas, burgers, hot dogs, and shawarma. As if to demonstrate the advice don't order when hungry, we ordered too much and find ourselves facing a table overloaded with two huge pizzas, a mound of meat, and another mound of fries.

No matter. We'll stash the leftovers somewhere in the back, and we're satisfied. Sated. Full. And our spirits are restored. Onward: We have an Arctic Circle to cross.