We made it back home two nights ago! We both dropped right into work and such (laundry, house cleaning) but I thought I’d pop in.

If you are an instagram follower of mine you’ve been getting to see all of the wonderful pictures. Norway is gorgeous. It was a wonderful trip, with one major exception.

The major exception is that we both caught COVID on the trip (or likely, before the trip, in my case). So we fuddled through life the best we could, with poor information. And at the end, we had to change our flight to come back a few days later in order to ensure negative tests or a proof of recovery documentation for both of us, only to have the US change the testing requirement to mean we could have stayed with our original plans. Nonetheless the extra days were nice to make up for the sick ones.

So, 6 things things that were awesome about Norway:

1. In the summer it never gets dark! The sun goes down around 10:30 to 11 pm but it doesn’t go very far, and then it’s back up by 4 am.
2. Public transportation. In Oslo we used an app that you could buy tickets through as well as plan your route to wherever you were going. It was amazing to just step out on the street, walk a few blocks and hop on the bus or tram you needed.
3. There was a delicious bakery around the corner from our AirBNB in Oslo that we ate at too many times to count. Good cappuccinos as well as pastries and bread.
4. The people were wonderful and helpful. Everybody speaks English (they learn from a young age) and even though I felt guilty that I didn’t speak much Norwegian (really, any, more than a phrase or two) nobody seemed to be too bothered by this.
5. The fjords really are gorgeous, and the mountains. The train from Oslo to Bergen was more beautiful than we expected.
6. Boat rides: if you go to Norway, you MUST take a boat ride.

3 Things that aren’t quite as awesome about Norway:

1. Everything, especially food, is incredibly expensive. If you get a sandwich at a restaurant, it’s $25 to $30. Even the grocery store is more expensive that you’d expect.
2. It’s very far away. We had to take three flights, which on the way back meant going through security three times. There weren’t any reasonably priced options that didn’t have three connections.
3. We had to leave! They wouldn’t just give us an apartment and jobs and let us stay there. We may have to look into that further.

So that’s the teaser post. I’ll write a bit more about in the next week or two about each location we visited (and of course share more photos): Bergen, Balestrand, and Oslo (where we spent over a week and really started to feel like locals, haha.) If you have an opportunity to visit Norway, I recommend you take it!