Surviving and Thriving

I guess I survived a BYOTP vacation.

I would do it again in a heartbeat. Being a little uncomfortable is a small sacrifice for all the amazing things I got to see and do.

It would be hard to travel on a budget here. While it was hard on the wallet to (even camping was expensive!) we did splurge and get a really excellent seafood dinner our last night there.

While traditional Norwegian cuisine was a rarity in Olso- there was mostly continental European restaurants and lots of Sushi restaurants- the seafood was some of the freshest and best-prepared I've had. Mussels and clams and shirmp and, of course, salmon were tasty as hell.

Another culinary discovery I made was that of Brunost. It's brown cheese, a specialty of the region. It's pretty much the opposite of the raw milk cheeses that I love and pine after. The milk and whey is boiled until the water evaporates and the milk sugars caramelize, turning it brown and making it unusually sweet and addictive, and would almost melt in your mouth. It was served at every breakfast in a big brick that you slice off with a cheese slicer. I looked forward to it every day.

My hike was fueled by brunost.

Now that my ankle bones can be seen clearly again (my temporary cankles were quite alarming) and my feet aren't so tender, and AirFrance managed to get our bags to us after a few days, life is good and I'm ready to hit the road and rails again.

This time there will be toilet paper.

Vigelandsparken

The must-see attraction in Oslo is Vigelandsparken.

I don't think I have ever seen anything like it. It's a whole park of bronze and stone sculptures of naked people at various ages and poses.

Gustav Vigeland sculpted all 212 statues. It took him over 20 years.

People fighting, playing, crying, loving, running. It was all very touching.

The centerpiece: A huge column carved from a single piece of stone.

The detail and the scale of it was mind-boggling.

Fram

Oslo is a Nautical town. You can hop a ferry as easily as you can a tram. In fact, it's often much faster since the Fjords tend to go on for a while.

There's a few museums easily accessed by boat. This is where the Kon-Tiki museum is- the original raft and artifacts from Thor Heyderhal's trip of 4,300 miles across the Pacific. There's a real Moai from Easter Island sitting out front.

We headed for the Fram museum. I've gone on and on about my fascination with Antarctic explorers in the past and this was a good way to feed it. Norwegians aren't known to shy away from cold and ice and snow and daring explorations, and there are many places devoted to their foolish ways.

Oddly, the entire museum was devoted to the English team led by Captain Scott (in English!), despite the fact that a team of Norwegians beat him to the south pole. I have no idea the logic behind this choice, but I'm sure the Norwegians have a great story to tell as well.

They did have the Fram ship, the boat built to withstand pretty much everything. It made it to the Antarctic and it was also the first ship to go for the Northwest Passage successfully.

The ship was enormous and the A-frame building was built to house it and the artifacts from the voyage.

We also went to Akershus Fortress, a picturesque medieval fort on the waterfront where the Kings and Queens would take up residence.

Norweigian history is dullsville. They didn't seem to have any tabloid fodder that the French and English royal families gave us. Most of their Kings were from Denmark anyway, so a great deal of the artifacts the museum had weren't even from Norway. Yawn.

They did have lots of gorgeous tapestries from Brussels.

It was too nice of a day to spend any more time inside, so we headed to Vigelandsparken to get some sun.

Kinsarvik to Voss

It was so nice to rest at a comfortable place and not have to get up and put the boots on again. I thought to bring a pair of flip-flops to wear in the huts and those were now my A game shoes.

We left the charming B&B we stayed at early, fueled by real coffee and freshly washed. We headed into Kinsarvik to pick up the car ferry that will port you across the Fjord.

We had a couple hours before the bus showed up to take us to Voss, so I laid out my towel by the fjord and was quite content to have a picnic breakfast and take a snooze in the sun without feeling guilty about being lazy.

Voss ended up being a ski resort town. It took me a while to connect the dots, but the expensive bottled water in cylindrical bottels...Voss. Yup.

But in Voss, it's just called "tap water".

The cultural museum had a throwback grass roof, just like the little cottages we saw everywhere.

We hopped a train to Oslo from Voss. The train climbed back up to Finse and then made its way back to the verdant green of lowland Norway.

We did see a lot of snow-plow trains. I'm a little afraid of what this place might be like in January.