lairdandjonelle

It’s over, but there was still much to see that we didn’t get to. Our last day in Oslo, we went to the folk museum — really good museum, but it is laid out over several acres and we were unhappily in the rain tromping around and my back/hip/leg were not happy. What we saw was very interesting, but there was lots more we didn’t see. We tried to get a taxi twice, but when we pressed the number for English, nothing happened, so we tried for an uber, but I think no one wanted to drive to the museum from city centre or wherever they were — so we would get the text that someone was coming, but then they just fell off the map, so after several attempts, we went back to trying for taxi. After 2 more failed attempts at getting one, I stopped a guy leaving the museum (the woman in the museum shop was not only not helpful, but was condescendingly not helpful! I take it back about Norwegians being so nice and helpful) and he got hold of the taxi and the English number worked for him. By this time, I was taking every failure personally that the IT Gods were purposefully and malignantly interfering with attempts at getting us back to our hotel.

Finally back to our hotel, final packing, bedtime at 8 so we could get up at 3. Oslo to Helsinki, Helsinki to Dallas, Dallas to ABQ, ABQ to home. Ahhhhh. The month had changed from when we went out, so at least there were some new movie choices. In both flights, I watched some very lovely small movies (meaning not blockbusters or action movies), but I don’t remember the titles by now.

Finnair is a nice airline if you’re going wherever they fly. It’s a partner with American, which we flew to Dallas and back. Qatar is still my favorite though, and Turkish air. I used to like South Africa air, but haven’t traveled on it since they almost went broke and it was too worrisome to try them — we flew Delta instead and what I loved most about it was that they cleaned and restocked the bathrooms during the night (it’s the not-so-small things, y’all!)

Thanks for reading our trip — hope you get to travel somewhere you’ve wanted to go soon and have a great time at it — Happy Trails, Jonelle & Laird

Let’s see — I just kind of accidentally fall into the pics, so who knows what will be.

Did you see the Hulder? This is long, but I took out at least a couple of hundred and didn’t even put in a couple hundred more — so y’all might be subjected to LOTS of pictures. But they don’t tell the true majesty of the landscape — our phones can’t do what Laird’s cameras did, but phone in the pocket is a lot easier to carry around. Most of these were from bus or train.. Oslo pics will just have to wait until we get home, I suspect. Norway was Brodo, Trondheim, Geiranger, Bergen and a couple of other places we stayed. Today was last tour day, goodbye dinner tonight; tomorrow is our last day in Norway, we fly on Monday and should be home Monday night.

So, let’s see if we can do this.

Well, hell, this is hard — I can’t get back to pics, so this may be the only one for now. And this is Norway — I was trying to put in Sweden, but other than the Sami, there isn’t anything striking about Sweden. I’ll try for those.

A couple of other pics, too. It was COLD the day we went to the Sami exhibit or whatever to call it. I’m with Lotte.

Here’s more pics from earlier in the trip

Sea troll

Sea troll is the first one of this series, I think — the one that looks like he’s in water anyway.

The newest museum in Bergen, the troll museum, was fantastic — everything you ever wanted to know about trolls, hulders, neisse and other critters in folklore. You learn that trolls are huge guys, with tails and 1-3 or 4 heads (think I already told you some of this) — they are definitely meat eaters, including sheep, cows and…humans. They particularly like young women, but that is a tale that can get ickky pretty quickly. They only come out at night because the sun makes them explode and turn into rock — so just think about what I had to say about all the rocks in Norway…. In one room, an oldfashioned living room with a TV from the early 50s, there is a troll outside the picture window looking for a way in — very noisy about his frustration. There are different types of Neisse (I think that is the spelling), there are house ones and barn ones and whatever else. They are very helpful to their owners who are kind to them and they look forward to their christmas present they get each year. One story has a very eager barn neisse that takes care of the horses, and does all the work of feeding, watering, unhitching them from the buggies back from trips to town and putting them up for the night. He was so good and so eager to please that come christmas time, the farmer got him a present of leather pants, which he gave him with much fanfare. The neisse was ecstatic with his new pants! He put them on and didn’t take them off. The farmer and his family went to church on christmas day and when they got back, the farmer just dropped the reins and everyone went into the house as usual. Much, much later, the farmer looked out and saw the horses still standing there in the dooryard, still hitched to the buggy. Out the farmer came, stomping angrily towards the barn, yelling for the neisse, who was standing in the door in lhis new leather pants, smiling up at the moon. “Why have you not put up the horses?! Cried the farmer. The neisse just stood there with his fingers in the belt loops of his new leather pants, smiling. “What”, he replied, “and ruin my new pants?”

Oh, but the hulders. They sing like Loralei, enticing people who are never seen again. We actually saw a hulder on the train trip to Voss — first the beautiful singing and then the hulder dancing behind the boulders, long blonde hair and red cape streaming in the breeze, with the haunting music enthalling us. We could not look away. Luckily, the train kept on and no one tried to jump off. In the troll musuem, one story has it that the hulders are the children of Lilith — if you don’t know the ancient story of Lilith, get my book, Cruisin’ Passion Boulevard (on Amazon) and read A Hell of a Woman (shameless plug, I know). But here in the north, the tale is different, much influenced by christianity so that her children were hulders and very evil — they had not been evil in the earlier northern stories. Interesting, huh?

So now we are going to try to post pictures. Wish us luck.

The bus driver, Vitaly, told us that it rains every other day in Bergen. So, it rained on walking tour day. Not RAIN, just that annoying kind that you can’t really see and you keep telling yourself you aren’t getting wet. We were. Bergen is beautiful (of course, how not???) and the walking/busing tour was interesting. Our hotel was near the harbor and old town — though apparently old town for residents is much further away. I don’t understand any of that, but what we saw would have been even older if it hadn’t been for all the fires that happened in a town of wooden houses. The 1834 fire burned over 400 residences. Some neighborhoods were still old by US standards. Here’s something we learned: the rich people back then painted their houses white because it was the most expensive paint. The poor people painted their houses red because that was the cheapest paint. The rest of them painted them all the other colors, mustard yellow being a favorite. I love the architecture in Bergen — in most of Norway; it was less interesting the closer we got to Oslo, but by the time we got here, it was pitch black dark so can’t tell what it looks like here. We learned other stuff, but that’s all I can remember right now after a 2-hour bus ride back to Voss and then a 7-hour train ride to Oslo. Like almost all historic areas, there are lots of warren-like narrow streets and alleys and houses cheek by jowl or higgledy-piggledy. Very picturesque, but it would be living with five neighbors staring into your bedroom from five different directions.

Remember the Hanseatic League from history? It was in Bergen. 400 years, German traders. They had their own enclave, all men, no women. Make that all young men, no women. The red light district was born. Here’s a weird thing: in the winter, they could not have fires and they couldn’t cook where they lived, so they had to go some distance away to cook food and get warm. Why the hell they didn’t just move to where they could do those things was not explained. Or maybe it was, the guide was not always easy to hear or understand. Somebody google it and report back. They lived in an autonomous neighborhood, had their own church that only they went to and had quite a lot of political clout. Some of the cannons on the wall around the harbor did not point out to sea, but toward the hanseatic neighborhood.

After most of the tour, we decided to go to the fish market for lunch — OMG, it was so good! We both had fish soup — cod and salmon, carrots and leeks, creamy, with drizzle of chervil-tarragon oil (oh, THAT was so good!) — more delicate than our chowders. Laird had a mushroom and cheese open-faced sandwich (really, in a fish market?), but I had: whale carpaccio and shellfish symphony, langoustines, king crab, stone crab, shrimp and mussels. I was in seafood heaven! Yes, I shared some. We both had a recommended white that was pretty good. Needless to say, we did not have dinner.

That’s all I can remember now. Time for bed — amazing how much fatigue riding a train for 7 hours can be, particularly when it is a local that stops about every 20-30 minutes in every little community along the way. 16 stops on a 400Km route. The landscape continued to amaze. I believe that Norway beats even Ireland for number/amount/weight of: Rocks. Little rocks, big rocks. Boulders. Gigantic boulders. Mountains of just bare rock. The country doesn’t have much flat land — most of the room is taken up by rocks. If ever you want to see how growing and shrinking glaciers (estimate 20 to 40 cycles) carve gneiss country rock, come to Norway.

Let’s see — where were we and where did we go? I feel like one of the many, many sheep we see in the fields — waiting for the dog to come to tell me where to go next: you, go there now! With or without luggage depending on time of day. It is hard not having a memory. Our fabulous tour manager, Deb, is a wonder — we were very lucky to get her; this is her first trip on this tour, but she does astounding in=depth research on everything. She says she probably won’t sign up for it again. — she’s looking at Asia next.

On Sunday night we finally saw the northern lights — not the most spectacular, but still, we saw them and were thrilled. We got a whatsap from Deb and sprang from our beds, put on shoes and coats and hied it outdoors. We were with a group of Taiwanese and their excited chatter sounded like being in a very close but full aviary.

Monday, we took the ferry, about an hour, to Hellesvlt and then on the bus for more slack-jawed awe as we traveled (a long way) through mountains and up another hairpinny road to skywalk — it was bitterly cold as we exited the bus, felt like 40 below with the meanest wind trying to blow us off the platform! We worried about a little dog whose owner kept dragging it nearer the edge, which it, smartly, did not want to get anywhere near. If she had lost hold of the leash, I am sure the wind would have picked it up and hurled it into space. Going down, another time that was not a picnic. There were lots of places like that all over the place. Luckily, well sorta, was going back down into Geiranger we took a slightly less heart attack road than the original one.

We were really lucky to go to skywalk — it had been closed the day before because of snow and turned out it was closed the day after we were there for whatever reason. It was breathtaking — kind of grand canyon awe, but wider.

I feel like I am on beauty overload — there really is nothing that is less staggeringly beautiful than what came before or will come after — true, every turn of the tires. Laird used up his phone battery on pics then took mine — we’ll probably never be able to identify where any of them are from, and they can’t capture what it really feels like to be in all that beauty.

Trauma bonding has become our group’s catch word. From not getting the trains we were promised to two of us old ladies falling (I was pushed! I blame in on the train, not my ineptitude!).

After 2 nights in Geiranger (ghear-anger, sort of), we got on the bus to Flam (accent mark, of course, the little empty circle above the a). Stopped at 12th century Kaupanger Stave Church — gorgeous, and our guide, whose name was Judith, pronounced Yudith, sang for us; she was quite wonderful, even though I couldn’t really hear what she had to say, or sing, either. Then on to a christmas shop. The shop owner was very funny and sure loved to laugh. I still want a reindeer rug, but no one will ship to the US. We took another ferry to Flam and had a nice hotel.

I do think we might have lucked out with not having several of the trains we were supposed to take because I think we saw lots more of Norway, and Sweden, than we would have otherwise seen. But today, we took two trains after going for a two-hour cruise on two fjords — more spectacularness, of course. Back to Flam and then trains that were supposed to be to Bergen, but weren’t because of some landslide or something. Back on the bus at Voss (kinda wonder why the train if the bus had to meet us in Voss, but oh well) and we went through 33 tunnels to get to Bergen. Yesterday, we went through the Laerdal tunnel, which is the longest road tunnel in the world and 24.5 kilometers — 15 miles for us Americans. Took 21 minutes. Before that, we had like an 11 kilometer tunnel as the “pretunnel”. In the Laerdal, to keep drivers awake and attentive, they vary the intensity of the lights and in the middle, there are lights washing the sides of the tunnel that look like the northern lights.

In Bergen, Laird and I walked down to a shopping center to buy replacement suitcases for me — both of mine had screwed up handles. The new ones are a godawful mint green, but they were cheaper than others and on sale to boot (though still an unwanted expense). I will just have to suck it up and not mind that anyone looking at them will be thinking “god, all that woman’s taste is in her mouth!” And other derogatory musings. My only defense is that the other color was very Barbie pink. We brought them back to hotel and went out again for a very lovely dinner with another passenger, from Scotland. I had venison with chanterelles and brussels sprouts, with roasted potatoes, and Laird had monkfish in lobster sauce with something green. Oh, and I had two orders of oysters in a most amazing sauce, green and delicious. Alas, an order is 2 oysters — isn’t that just ridiculous?!? I gave Laird 1. We shared coconut mousse and homemade raspberry-like dessert — I’m a coconut slut and this was delish! Local pink gin and tonic. Now, time for bed. Tomorrow a tour of Old Town and the Hanseatic League warehouses, etc.