In the Fjords of Norway, a Family Reunion My mother has been known to cry at commercials, so the tears she shed during our ferry ride down the Fjaerland Fjord in Norway weren't a shock. But even my father, not exactly the world's top aesthete, seemed equally mesmerized by the sights all around us: the clusters of prim red cottages tucked into the sides of the snow-streaked mountains that rise from the fjords, the occasional tumbling waterfall, the porpoises surfacing through otherwise still waters. Meanwhile, I was clicking away, obsessed with capturing the surrounding beauty - and also with the sheer luck of having the tiny little Skanevik car ferry all to ourselves. It was the third straight year that Peter and Judy Kugel have parachuted in (not literally: they are 82 and 74, respectively) on their son's frugal summer adventures. During their passes with me through Nicaragua and Croatia, it was easy to stay on budget, trading the economies of rooming and eating with others for the cost of a slightly higher comfort level befitting the people who raised me. But prices in Norway are so distorted that even with this pair of longtime low-budget travelers - who eschew high-end hotels and rarely eat out when cheese, crackers and yogurt are for sale within striking distance - I had a challenge on my hands. In Norway, a cabin at a campsite costs as much as a boutique hotel in Bolivia and a restaurant entrée under $20 is more commonly referred to as a Whopper. We met in Oslo and, following a tip from a Norwegian friend, headed by bus to the tiny town of Fjaerland, population 280, seven hours away. It's best known as being home to the turreted Hotel Mundal, opened in 1891, and a shocking number of used book stores. I balked, initially, at subjecting my parents to a seven-hour bus ride (578 kroner, or $98 at 5.87 kroner to the dollar), but the winding trip by pristine lakes and gorgeous forests ended up being closer to an IMAX movie than your typical trip on Greyhound. Though I would be tenting it at Boyum Camping, a 20-minute walk down the fjord from Mundal, as Fjaerland's central village is known, I gave them the option to stay at the hotel for 1,700 kroner (about $290) a night - fairly reasonable in Norwegian terms. Of course, it would have been on their dime and, predictably, they declined, opting instead for a simple (but bathroom-equipped) cabin at Boyum for 570 kroner a night. Set just off the fjord, practically next door to the Norsk BreMuseum (the Norwegian Glacier Museum, where entry is a painful 120 kroner) and of course, near their son, it was the right pick. We headed to town to grocery shop, check out the pretty church and peruse the used book shops Mundal is known for. We also peeked into the hotel to inquire how much dinner might cost (425 kroner, about $72; not even close), and chatted up the manager, Knut-Arne Bredal-Thorsen, who gave us a tour of its classy rooms, old-school common spaces (complete with Victrolas and fjord views) and a surprise: a space dedicated to the former Vice President Walter Mondale. Mundal, Mondale! It turns out Mundal was his family's ancestral home. The hotel was founded by his relatives, and he had visited while in office. An official vice presidential seal adorned the wall. The grocery store in town provided most of our meals for our days there (Jarlsberg cheese, yogurt, bacon, eggs and reindeer sausage, which tasted a bit like liverwurst), but we ended up eating lunch in the other old hotel in town, the recently overhauled Fjaerland Fjordstue Hotell. A light salad with sliced chicken breast may have cost 90 kroner, but was served in front of picture windows with fjord views in a room packed with fascinating old stuff, including a 1960 edition of Arthur Frommer's "Europe on $5 a Day" on the shelves. Note to self: start work on updated version: "Norway on $5 an Ice Cream Cone." Norwegian-language used bookstores turn out to be not as boring as you might think. A cafe and bookstore called Kaffistova serves decent carrot cake; a former boat shed (nameless, as far as I could tell) houses a collection of Norwegian-language comic books, and Tusund og Ei Natt ("A Thousand and One Nights") has a large English-language collection as well as Norwegian editions of old-school kid sleuth series like "Detektiv Nancy Drew" and the "Hardy-Guttene." After two days, we headed out the fjords and down the coast by boat to Bergen and there hopped an $82 flight to Trondheim, in central Norway, to catch the Hurtigruten, Norway's famous coastal passenger and cargo boat line. The full northbound trip, popular with foreigners, takes six days and costs over 45,000 kroner (about $7,600) for a three-person cabin and full board - obviously way beyond our means. The typical Norwegian goes to the other extreme, using the ship as a short-hop ferry, which along some stretches are competitively priced compared with bus and plane trips. I went for a compromise: the 45-hour stretch between Trondheim and Harstad. We'd skip meals and I'd even go cabinless, putting down a sleeping bag in one of the lounges for a discount. It would still be costly - a total of 2,640 kroner for me ($450) and 3,800 ($650) or so for each of my parents (plus groceries, gathered at various stops, for meals), but I hoped it would be worth the splurge. Our verdict was mixed. On the one hand, there's no other way to zig and zag through the fjords and around the little islands that make the Norwegian coast look as though it was backed up against a wood chipper. Using visual clues - a power line here, a fish farm there - my dad and I tried to surmise how people made a living in the sparsely populated region, a classic Kugel exercise. And marveling at the midnight sun clinging to the horizon against a changing background is disorienting and exhilarating (and by 2 a.m., exhausting) all at once. But eating from grocery supplies grew stale both literally and figuratively (I did a lot of gnawing on reindeer sausage), so we gave in to the temptations of the 295 kroner lunch buffet, pigging out on salmon and herring and cold cuts and salads and cakes. "I feel like I was just in an eating contest, and I won," said my mom as she collapsed into a deck chair afterward. And there's no question the best part of our cruise was the 24 hours we spent after debarking, in the 4,600-person town of Bronnoysund, planning to catch the next Hurtigruten ship the next day. Around the solstice, northern Norway has a slew of celebrations. By chance, we were arriving in Bronnoysund during the biennial Korfestivalen, or choir festival. A rowdy group serenaded us from a pier when we arrived at 12:30 a.m.; after a 1,500-kroner stay in a suite at the Corner Motell (seemingly the best deal in town) we spent the next morning hearing a capella groups perform tunes like "Drunken Sailor" on a main street in town. Again, my mother teared up at the music. I was more intrigued by two pieces of local flavor: the waffles with sour cream and jam sold for 20 kroner by the stage, and the event's M.C., a man with a bushy blond mustache, racing glasses, a white tailcoat and a lavender bow tie and cummerbund who had the crowd in stitches telling jokes in Norwegian. After the performance, we went to the supermarket and then hopped a ferry to Vega Archipelago, designated a Unesco World Heritage site for "a distinctive frugal way of life based on fishing and the harvesting of the down of eider ducks." Arriving midafternoon in Vega, the main island, we rented bikes for half a day (100 kroner each), and sped off to the town of Nes (as fast as an 82 year-old can speed) to try to catch the E-house Museum, devoted to the eider duck, before it closed at 4 p.m. Perhaps fortuitously, we missed the museum's close and instead met a woman who invited us to a local celebration of Sankt Hans Aften (St. John's Eve), a midsummer holiday dedicated to John the Baptist. Islanders had gathered in a community hall to eat a traditional porridge prepared by Johanna Toppen, an older islander dressed in an embroidered white blouse and a blue-checkered apron. I split a bowl with my father for 60 kroner, a bargain if measured per gram of fat: the porridge may have looked like Cream of Wheat but was thick with sour cream; sprinkling cinnamon-sugar in top and dousing it with a ladle of butter brought the taste closer to frosting. It was spectacular. At our table was Ina Andreassen, a young museum worker who generously offered to open the museum back up for us and show us around. Maybe it was just her charm, but the relationship of the islanders with the eider ducks was amazing: traditionally, the ducks nested on small islands, attracted by the shelters built by residents who cultivated close relationships with them, wearing the same clothes daily so the ducks recognize them. Ms. Andreassen showed us a volleyball-size puff of down, which literally felt as light as air: I made my dad close his eyes and hold out both hands to guess which hand I placed the down in; he couldn't tell. Duvets made from the down sell for 36,000 kroner each, but caring for the ducks and collecting and cleaning the down is so labor-intensive that the workers still have to be subsidized to keep the tradition alive, she told us. Ms. Andreassen (who would not let us pay for the museum visit) sent us off to the communal Sankt Hans Aften bonfire - a family-friendly gathering by the shore - and arranged a taxi to meet us there to catch the last ferry, which my schedule from the Bronnoysund information office said left at 7:20 p.m. The island has three taxis, and our cabbie was Bjorn, actually a fisherman covering for the regular driver. He had us to the quay at 7 p.m. sharp. The ferry was already there, but as we pulled up, it closed its hatch and pulled away. In seconds, that how-could-this-be-happening punch-in-the-gut panic swept over us: we'd miss the ship and my parents would surely miss their plane back to Oslo. In those same seconds, Bjorn got on his cellphone and muttered something in Norwegian. The ferry reversed, pulling into the harbor, and opened its hatch. It turns out having a fisherman as a taxi driver had paid off. "I know the captain," he said with a hint of a smile. We had spent 600 kroner each - a hefty amount - for our day on Vega Archipelago, but back on the ship, I noticed that the Hurtigruten offers a four-hour excursion to the Vega (on its southbound route) that costs 1,150 kroner each, including a visit to the duck museum. But it did not include a bike ride, or special Sankt Hans porridge, or personal attention from Ina, or a bonfire, or excitement at seeing the last ferry of the day being turned around and sent back to you thanks to a phone call from a fisherman named Bjorn. My mother has the sweet habit of asking my father "Are you happy?" - usually to elicit information on how his life is going slightly more than 82 years after it started. When she asked him the next day, on the final stretch of the Hurtigruten liner as our week together drew to a close, his answer was more mundane than my mom expected. "I would be happier," he said, "if Norway were cheaper and we could do the things we wanted to do."