Scandinaviacation
We returned yesterday from a two-week-long vacation in Norway and Sweden.
We flew into Bergen, and took the light rail to an airbnb in a lovely old neighborhood. The building was 300 years old, with a shop on the ground floor. It was not raining the day we arrived, something we did not appreciate enough at the time, since Norway pretty much rained on us continually, with only occasional brief sunbreaks. We spent two days touristing in Bergen - on day one, we visited the Maritime Museum, Haakon's Hall, Rosencrantz Tower and Bergen City Museum. We also went up the Floibanen funicular and ate our first pølse (why do American hotdogs not come wrapped in a potato pancake with crispy fried onion topping?). (Later we would eat reindeer pølse, plukkfisk, fish pie and about a ton of candy. No pickled fish, though.)
On the second day, we visited Gamle Bergen, rode the little Beffen ferry, and browsed through tourist stores selling troll dolls in the Bryggen.
There were a LOT of tourists in Bergen, most of them not American. (Though we did enjoy being enveloped by an American group from "Kosher Cruises," a participant of which commented that the weather was "meshugeneh.") There were also quite a few signs in the bathrooms, presumably for the education of tourists from places where toilets aren't the same:
In Bergen, we also went on a quest to the mall to find pants for Skipper, and ended up also buying her a yellow raincoat that she adores and that came in very handy for keeping her dry and also easy to find in a crowd.
We rented a car and drove to an airbnb in Leikanger, where we stayed for four nights while poking around the Sognfjord area. We visited the glacier museum and Boyabreen glacier and Bokbyen.
On our most ambitious day, we drove the Aurlandsfjellet, a scenic road over mountains that has been replaced for normal driving by a 24 kilometer tunnel, and now is only open in summer, and driven only by tourists. Norway is full of narrow roads, and in many places there's only room for one car at a time, and you have to pull over (or back up in order to pull over) into one of the frequent pull-out spots to give way to oncoming traffic. Also, there are a lot of sheep with strong opinions about who owns the roads. We stopped at the Stegastein viewpoint on the way down, and ate our lunch on a rock just up the hill from the parking lot.
Duchess took a photo out the bathroom window at Stegastein.
After Stegastein, we drove to Gudvangen to catch the car ferry that runs up the Naeroyfjord to Kaupanger, and then home from there. It was a lot of driving, and a lot of spectacular scenery.
On a very rainy day, we abandoned our hopes of seeing a stave church, and went instead to the Sogn Folkemuseum. These pigs were, I think, Skipper's favorite thing about the entire trip.
We drove back to Bergen, returned the car, and spent a last afternoon in Bergen. (We did some successful thrift shopping in Bergen and then Oslo, though we never did find Skipper the affordable Norwegian sweater she yearns for.)
We caught the morning train to Oslo. This is a very pretty train ride.
In Oslo, we walked to the Vigelandspark, and then walked back to the hotel past a punk/anarchist squat house.
We took a bus to Sweden. This is what it looks like when you cross into Sweden.
The reason for the whole trip was to honor my mom's request to gather her children and their families at her childhood summer home in Sweden. I've been there a few times, most recently eighteen summers ago. It hasn't actually changed a lot, unlike basically everything else in my life and the world.We spent five nights there. Cook and my brothers and the kids did a lot of things like sailing and kayaking and playing croquet and kubb and a ridiculous golf/croquet hybrid that my older brother made up on the spot using plastic lawn furniture. I mostly sat around reading or staring off into space. (I realize that this is what everybody now expects of me, so I really don't even need to stipulate what I do on vacation. This is what I do.) Sometimes I held Ume or listened to Momotaro talk about dragons.
We wrapped up our trip by taking the bus back to Oslo and spending a final day and a half there. The half day we spent wandering around Slottsparken and Frogner. Skipper's fantastic raincoat enjoyed a final Norwegian outing, because it was, naturally, raining.
We took the museum ferry over to the Bygdoy peninsula and went to the Viking Ship Museum, the Folk Museum and the Fram Museum. I enjoyed all of these museums - I like (reading about) Vikings and polar exploration very much. And my favorite thing about the many Norwegian folk museums we visited is that people in Norway (and presumably elsewhere) in the 14th-19th century would lick their spoons clean and then put them in some kind of storage space, like a wall hanger or... a crack in the wall.
Also, we saw a Norwegian rowing club from the ferry.
We ferried back to the city center and ate some expensive mediocre Italian food at an interesting new development down by the waterfront - very yuppie, but with lots of art and really nice public space for sitting near the water and people watching.
We got up at 3:30 AM Sunday morning, Oslo time, and arrived back in Portland just before noon Portland time. It was a really, really long day. (This is a photo of us waiting for the airport train at the Nationaltheatret station at 4:25 AM. Note Cook's vacation beard, which was shaved off later that day when we got home. RIP.)
And that's the trip! It was exhausting and exhilarating and disorienting. Now we have to go back to work and school (the girls missed their first three days of school - poor Duchess is starting highschool, and will have to jump into freshman year three days late) and return to normal life. Cook said, the night before we came home, that he would miss being in a place where he doesn't really understand anything, where the signs are mysterious. I think that's what I like about traveling, too - you're always off balance.
We flew into Bergen, and took the light rail to an airbnb in a lovely old neighborhood. The building was 300 years old, with a shop on the ground floor. It was not raining the day we arrived, something we did not appreciate enough at the time, since Norway pretty much rained on us continually, with only occasional brief sunbreaks. We spent two days touristing in Bergen - on day one, we visited the Maritime Museum, Haakon's Hall, Rosencrantz Tower and Bergen City Museum. We also went up the Floibanen funicular and ate our first pølse (why do American hotdogs not come wrapped in a potato pancake with crispy fried onion topping?). (Later we would eat reindeer pølse, plukkfisk, fish pie and about a ton of candy. No pickled fish, though.)
On the second day, we visited Gamle Bergen, rode the little Beffen ferry, and browsed through tourist stores selling troll dolls in the Bryggen.
In Bergen, we also went on a quest to the mall to find pants for Skipper, and ended up also buying her a yellow raincoat that she adores and that came in very handy for keeping her dry and also easy to find in a crowd.
We rented a car and drove to an airbnb in Leikanger, where we stayed for four nights while poking around the Sognfjord area. We visited the glacier museum and Boyabreen glacier and Bokbyen.
On our most ambitious day, we drove the Aurlandsfjellet, a scenic road over mountains that has been replaced for normal driving by a 24 kilometer tunnel, and now is only open in summer, and driven only by tourists. Norway is full of narrow roads, and in many places there's only room for one car at a time, and you have to pull over (or back up in order to pull over) into one of the frequent pull-out spots to give way to oncoming traffic. Also, there are a lot of sheep with strong opinions about who owns the roads. We stopped at the Stegastein viewpoint on the way down, and ate our lunch on a rock just up the hill from the parking lot.
Duchess took a photo out the bathroom window at Stegastein.
After Stegastein, we drove to Gudvangen to catch the car ferry that runs up the Naeroyfjord to Kaupanger, and then home from there. It was a lot of driving, and a lot of spectacular scenery.
We stayed at a house that was right on the fjord, in Leikanger. It was cold, and full of flies, but the view was unbeatable.
On a very rainy day, we abandoned our hopes of seeing a stave church, and went instead to the Sogn Folkemuseum. These pigs were, I think, Skipper's favorite thing about the entire trip.
We drove back to Bergen, returned the car, and spent a last afternoon in Bergen. (We did some successful thrift shopping in Bergen and then Oslo, though we never did find Skipper the affordable Norwegian sweater she yearns for.)
We caught the morning train to Oslo. This is a very pretty train ride.
In Oslo, we walked to the Vigelandspark, and then walked back to the hotel past a punk/anarchist squat house.
We took a bus to Sweden. This is what it looks like when you cross into Sweden.
The reason for the whole trip was to honor my mom's request to gather her children and their families at her childhood summer home in Sweden. I've been there a few times, most recently eighteen summers ago. It hasn't actually changed a lot, unlike basically everything else in my life and the world.We spent five nights there. Cook and my brothers and the kids did a lot of things like sailing and kayaking and playing croquet and kubb and a ridiculous golf/croquet hybrid that my older brother made up on the spot using plastic lawn furniture. I mostly sat around reading or staring off into space. (I realize that this is what everybody now expects of me, so I really don't even need to stipulate what I do on vacation. This is what I do.) Sometimes I held Ume or listened to Momotaro talk about dragons.
We took the museum ferry over to the Bygdoy peninsula and went to the Viking Ship Museum, the Folk Museum and the Fram Museum. I enjoyed all of these museums - I like (reading about) Vikings and polar exploration very much. And my favorite thing about the many Norwegian folk museums we visited is that people in Norway (and presumably elsewhere) in the 14th-19th century would lick their spoons clean and then put them in some kind of storage space, like a wall hanger or... a crack in the wall.
Also, we saw a Norwegian rowing club from the ferry.
We ferried back to the city center and ate some expensive mediocre Italian food at an interesting new development down by the waterfront - very yuppie, but with lots of art and really nice public space for sitting near the water and people watching.
And that's the trip! It was exhausting and exhilarating and disorienting. Now we have to go back to work and school (the girls missed their first three days of school - poor Duchess is starting highschool, and will have to jump into freshman year three days late) and return to normal life. Cook said, the night before we came home, that he would miss being in a place where he doesn't really understand anything, where the signs are mysterious. I think that's what I like about traveling, too - you're always off balance.
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Love to all of you from Nina and the gang