Sometimes I feel like my life is harder than it needs to be, but most of the time I feel pretty lucky. I think of how lucky I was to meet Louie when I did: both of us were recently out of long term relationships and absolutely nobody around us thought we would stick as a couple, yet nearly 9 years later, here we are.

Which brings us to Norway: because of Louie’s hard work and crazy life choices, such as pursuing a PhD while working full time, and after COVID travel was pretty much going again, he got asked to present at a conference in Oslo, so that meant I was going to, because of course! And if you’ve been reading the blog before, you know I made a plan for our trip which involved going about a week early to travel some other places in Norway first.

Between Rick Steves, Fodor’s, and Trip Advisor, I made a pretty good travel plan with the time we had. I prepared the itinerary, purchased tickets and tours in advance, and made documents of activities to do and good restaurants in each city or town we were staying. I was prepared!

This never stops people from asking questions a day or two beforehand as if I’ve never heard of the country before. “You should go to Bergen.” “You should make sure to see the fjords.” Like, sometimes I swear everybody thinks I am a complete idiot. Is it the smile? Is it that I’m a woman? Do they treat everybody they meet as if they are complete idiots? Are there seriously people who plan trips to a foreign country and do nothing beyond buying the plane ticket and wait for this person to tell them, the day or days before, what to do? But I digress!

I am a planner. I don’t always do well with changes. COVID taught me to be more flexible and to expect the worse, but I still prefer when things work as planned. You ask, why am I mentioning this, didn’t I have a nice trip?

Anyway, I think I’ll divide this blog into 4-5 posts. This is post one, and there will be one for Bergen, one for Balestrand, and then one for our return to Oslo, which may be turned into 2. So that’s the plan: stay tuned but also don’t stay that tuned, because going through pictures is tough, so many!

The day before we were to set out we were both still working, and I even picked up an extra gig to help out a friend who was isolating with COVID in their family. We wanted to check in for our flight but couldn’t, and this caused us some consternation: it didn’t say why we couldn’t and we were worried that something had gone wrong with something involving COVID somehow. Anyway, after an hour on hold with American, we learned that likely everything was fine and we could just check in at the airport.

It turned out the problem was that we were starting with American, but the second 2 flights were with Finnair, a partner, and Finnair didn’t let American customers check in online. No big deal. We got to the airport, got our boarding passes, seats, etc. Flew to Chicago, and had a long layover: had to change terminals, go through security, etc, so it was nice to have the time. We had lunch there, and facetimed family, and then had to get new boarding passes for our next flight (Finnair has some control issues) and we ended up with “comfort seats” which meant we would have slightly more leg room on our long haul flight…amazing!

In any case, our long haul flight was fine. We tried to sleep after they served dinner…I probably got 4 hours of sleep, which was pretty impressive. I had a neck pillow which helped tremendously.

We landed in Helsinki, and went through passport control, which means they stamped our passports and asked questions about why we were there. I was fairly incoherent and couldn’t remember at that point, but I’m sure the passport guys are used to jet lag and tired passengers. We had a short layover in Helsinki, and I was feeling lousy and nauseated from the travel (or was it), headache and dehydrated. We finally boarded our third flight, to Oslo, and I slept some more. The landing was tough and it was the first time to my recollection, that I almost threw up. In any case, we left Oslo airport without further incident (and no customs that we could tell unless we missed something super important) and caught a Flytoget train to Oslo S, the Central Train Station.

The Flytoget is the express airport train. In retrospect, for this journey we could have saved about $20 and taken a regular train since we weren’t in a hurry, but I’m not perfect in my planning. We go to the station and then found our first hotel for the night nearby: CityBox Oslo. It was early afternoon and before official check in but thankfully we were able to check in right away, which was great!

We knew we needed to keep moving, so we unpacked, cleaned up and then hit the streets, walking all over. It was a warm sunny day, and everybody seemed to be out and about. We grabbed lunch at a nearby restaurant first, pizza, which was a funny choice for Norway but it was easy and I thought it would sit well for me.

After we walked all over the place, we tried to decide what to do for dinner, and we settled on having a drink and a snack at a very old restaurant called Stortorvets Gjæstgiveri located relatively near our hotel. We had a lovely time there and kept ordering snack after snack until we no longer needed dinner. We went back to the hotel after that and I believe I was asleep by 8 pm (20:00 as the locals would say).

I woke up at some point in the middle of the night and noticed that while it was a little darker, it wasn’t that dark. It never really gets dark in Norway over the summer: the sun does set in Oslo, around 10:30 to 11, but it doesn’t go very far.

The next morning we had a train to catch for Bergen! We enjoyed a breakfast buffet at a nearby restaurant, Spor av Nord. It was somewhat attached to the hotel and offered a discount for hotel guests. We had coffee, orange juice, cheese, bread, smoked salmon, eggs, waffles, and more. Then we walked back to the Train Station and caught our train to Bergen. It would be a 7 hour journey, but everybody said it was a beautiful ride as well, and it was nice just to relax, since I was feeling exhausted, headachey, and still a little queasy here and there.

We packed food: caviar in a tube and crackers and Kvikk Lunsj, for the journey. It was a nice trip, and watching the Norwegian countryside as we traveled along was almost magical. We got to the middle of the trip, up in the mountains and were surprised to see that the landscape was changing to snow!

After a while, we struck up a conversation with the couple on the train across from us, who were British from London, and that was nice. And finally, we arrived in Bergen. It was raining a bit and was about 5 pm.

That’s where I’ll leave this travel blog recap for now. I may not be doing day by day in the future, I’m not sure. It seemed to make sense to start out, but may not make sense in the future, but I’ll decide later. Thanks for reading and let me know your thoughts in the comments! Have you visited Scandinavia before?

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!