…Norway, Somewhat Slowly (Part 4, final)

Seagulls and Marching Bands

I had forgotten how close-by the hotel was. I walked off to a cluster of obvious taxis and attempted to hire one. It took several tries, as every driver was excited to let me know how close my hotel was. Convenient for me, but not really workable for my father. Duolingo had not prepared me for explaining why I needed a cab to move us 100 meters. Eventually I broke through and convinced someone to take my money and we got to the hotel. The room was nice enough, though I could have done without the forehead-level metal bar that seemed to be holding the shower doors together. When we arrived the room was full of the distant echoes of political protest chants from what I would later discover was one of several small school marching bands that seemed to have swarmed the town for the day.

Kristiansand had only one major landmark my father was worried about finding, and unfortunately (and he already knew this) it had some time ago fallen to progress. A small collection of houses once stood on a street called “Frisk Jensens Gate” (“Gate” pronounced “gah-teh”). My great grandfather (whom I had never met) Nils Olsen (later Nils Frevold) had lived in this place before moving to America. I took some photographs and walked around a bit of the surrounding area, finding a hiking trail called Baneheia. I went down the path a bit and found a rocky hill with an old bench sitting on top of it. I decided to go up and see if any exciting things would be revealed from that higher perspective.

I could see the apartment building from there, and a bit of the cityscape, but not much else other than a nice park. Did my ancestors trod this same hill at some point? I’ll never know for sure. I half expected I should feel some primal urge to scream into the aether to echo in the same spaces of some unknown viking ancestor, but the reality was far more calm. There’s something oddly comforting about the thought that some distant part of my family might have walked over these same rocks.

I wandered around a bit more, finding this to very much be a walking-person’s sort of town. I took a bunch of pictures along the way and then went back to the hotel. We eventually got dinner and slept, but I was awoken around 4am by the chaotic sounds of every seagull on the planet. Apparently that one jerk bird in Voss had told his friends and now they were here for revenge. That’s definitely what happened.

Later in the morning I took another walk around, discovering on Google Maps that the street went on a good deal farther than I expected. Traversing the whole length of the named street, the oldest thing I found was a probably 50~70 year old cluster of homes, but nothing that looked like it was still standing for the last 135 years. I took some photos anyway, eventually reaching the end of the line: the back of some manner of businessy looking building with a collection of boulders that appeared to be a chunk of hiking trail preserved rather than being cleared out for more parking. Progress had consumed the whole rest of the street.

Probably what the old house would have looked like.

I continued on, finding a variety of odd things to document. I’ll take this spot to grumble about crosswalks. There’s a surprising amount of waiting if you want to get across the street. Usually you’ll see a signal box of some kind. They’re all shaped like tall boxes, and while they seem to have some kind of thought put into them, such as the inclusion of a tactile illustration of the crosswalk for seeing-impaired folks, the button placement is completely inconsistent from town to town, and even from street to street. I an a group of others were baffled when the cycle just skipped us twice, even though we had prodded at the thing in every way possible.

Crosswalk signals seem like they’re confusing on purpose.

After asking our taxi to the station to make a brief detour just to poke around the area a bit, we went to the station for our next layover: 3 hours in a train station that didn’t have much, bit it did have couches. Our train to Oslo was marked as being canceled past a place called Kongsberg, ensuring that not a single train ride would happen for us on this trip without incident of some kind. It would get us there most of the way, at least, after which a bus would get us the rest of the way.

A Walk in the Park, Among Other Things

The train-to-bus transfer had been complicated by my attempt at good planning. The app I had purchased the train tickets through had, some time earlier, warned me that the train would be disrupted and offered me an ultimatum, demanding I rebook the ride stopping in the last available station and then booking a bus for the rest of the trip. That wasn’t apparently the normal way of doing things. For the locals, they just shuffle you onto a bus to complete the trip, but whatever system the app was using didn’t care to tell me about it. We managed to get around to the other end of the transfer station to get on our bus and finally arrived in Oslo fairly late in the evening.

While going through that attempt at good planning, I had thought to book the bougiest place last, assuming we would be fairly worn down from the rest of the journey. I had not anticipated being quite as correct as I was. We stayed at the Clarion Hub, which felt sort of ridiculous, all told, but I was thankful for the comically large beds and access to good food. Once again, we came in at the wire for getting anything to eat, scarfing down what they had on offer before getting to sleep. The next day we had our boat tour and followed it up with a taxi tour of the area, the driver taking us past the Royal Palace, Parliament (appaerently also called “Stortinget”), and a few other landmarks.

Once that was done, I set off on my own a bit, naturally checking out the local edition of the same game store chain that I had found in Bergen. Apart from the odd store here and there selling board games, Outland appears to be the only game in town for this kind of stuff, and the Oslo location was packed with tabletop gaming and weeaboo junk. Naturaly I had to go looking to see how the stock of Final Fantasy Magic cards were in this location, and found a slew of starter kits I didn’t need. Amusingly my ear for Norwegian was good enough to overhear a customer asking the woman at the counter about the availability of the commander decks, lamenting how difficult they were to get hold of. Alas, outside of what little sealed product had already been cracked open, the whole supply for the country seemed tapped.

I gawked at things a bit, but finally moved on to do some more traditional sightseeing. I walked to the Royal Palace, getting more time to stop and aim the camera at some locations we had driven by on our taxi tour. The city was full of people enjoying the fleeting summer sun. The palace is surrounded in a public park full of people lounging around. And statues. All over the city. Apparently when you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to get health care, you start making statues.

The Storting Building, where the all the storting happens

Seriously. Statues are everywhere in this country, and even just in Oslo there were too many to list here, though there seem to be efforts elsewhere on the Internet to catalog everything in many cities. The palace park includes a whole section for statues based on childrens’ drawings, which I thought was particularly good.

Our journey back through airports and their various hurdles were thankfully uneventful. At the very last moment we finally got ourselves some brown cheese and waffles, the apparent staple touristy food for the country.

It turned out that, by accident, the wooden trolls I purchased in Bergen were made by the same company that had made the one my father had been keeping since the 1950s. Henning Engelsen and his company had been carving these things long ago and I happened upon what was apparently the only outlet selling them in Bergen. Maybe I just have an eye for quality, but they certainly stood out among the hoard of cheaper-looking alternatives. So now, after 70 years, the old king finally has a partner.

…Norway, Somewhat Slowly (Part 3)

Even more of our trip to Norway. This covers everything from leaving Voss for Bergen and the cruise from Bergen to Kristiansand.

Breakfast in Voss was quite nice, but in the background lurked an unexpected layer to the otherwise perfectly palatable experience. The whole time we ate they were playing eerily familiar piano music. At first I thought this might be recordings of previous live sessions recorded in that very same room (both of the pianos I noticed in the hotel had been stationed at different point in the evening the night before.) It wasn’t until we were nearly finished that I realized the music was actually piano arrangements of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and The Black-Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling.” Something about that was unsettling.

The Train We Sort of Took to Bergen

After waiting a bit after our previous mountain adventure, we boarded the train, our first successful boarding of a train on this trip. Our seats were comfortable, the space for luggage was more than sufficient, and the scenery was fantastic. For about twelve minutes.

An ill-timed bump on the bus lead to my USB adapter getting destroyed in a way I didn’t know it could.

Suddenly we were told that we needed to get off of the train so everyone could be picked up by a bus that would take us to our destination due to some kind of construction. We wound up waiting with the crowd for 20 minutes until the bus finally appeared. This driver seemed a little less comfortable in his role, making for an occasionally turbulent ride, gaining the occasional ire of some poor motorist caught in our path. No one was hurt, at least physically, and we eventually found ourselves in the city of Bergen.

Laundry Day in Bergen

Our first day in Bergen was laundry day. While my father rested in the hotel, I found a nearby laundromat and wandered the streets while our clothes washed and dried, taking photos of everything that seemed mildly interesting, which was quite a lot. The I was oddly thrilled to find a game store, which had comics, video games, Lego, board games, board games, weeaboo junk, and enough space to make it a functional local game store for, well, the locals. There was a single Starter Kit box from the Magic: the Gathering Final Fantasy set that had just released. I was almost tempted, but I knew I would have the cardboard I already ordered waiting for me when we got back. But that’s a story for another time.

Seemingly every street in this area of town is adorable.

The city center is a huge tourist destination, filled with shops selling little wooden figures with hair glued onto them, standard tourism trinkets to slap onto your refrigerator, enough “gorpcore” (faux expedition gear with random flags, emblems, and other embroidered testaments to their absolute super definite legitimacy) to clothe the rest of the EU, and a bunch of outdoor seating for people who want to drink alcohol while slow-cooking in the summer sun.

I wandered through a store called “Normal” because with a name like that, I just couldn’t help it. It turned out this was some kind of maze, designed like an Ikea. There was only one way to go. No shortcuts. Just product. Almost entirely convenience store-ish product mixed with mostly cosmetics. Why are marshmallows next to the makeup? I don’t think even the locals are sure. I awkwardly slid through this place and escaped to wander the streets some more.

I carried our refreshed laundry back and our adventure to find food began. We tried walking a block to the nearby Irish pub, which turned out to be a poor example of one. For one, there was hardly any food (the omission of fish and chips on the menu seemed particularly insulting). Adding injury to insult, they were out of Guinness. So we looked around for other restaurants, only to find everything was booked. We eventually gave up and got a ride back to the hotel and had a fine meal there. If nothing else, I got my father to walk down the street in Bergen for a bit, and have photographic evidence that it happened.

I took another look around, shopping for some proper hand-carved trolls. While there were lots of suspicious goods available, I only found one store selling stuff that seemed like it had any real craft put into it.

Someting Oddish about this hotel room plant.

The Peculiar Case of the Poorly Provided Port Place

The next day we checked out and grabbed a taxi to give us a general tour of the region, letting my father get a better look at the place as a whole. I took a few more shots of things, but generally just let the ride play out. At the end of the tour, we were dropped off where my ticket app told me the reception would be for our cruise. Something seemed immediately fishy about this boat situation. There was a reception desk, but none of the boats were the right size. Maybe they were to take us to the larger boat? I had no idea, but I asked what they thought. Eventually they came to the conclusion that the app had lied and that I should head to the larger port to the south. I looked for a taxi and found an empty one, meaning there was no driver there, which wasn’t particularly useful.

One Uber later and we were at the proper port and figured out all of the arrangements at the front desk. Amusingly we overheard someone who wanted to ride one of the smaller boats at the first port we went to, and it seemed their instructions had led them astray in the opposite direction. After some thrilling wheelchair pushing over horrible and really just not very friendly door thresholds and bumpy ramps, we successfully boarded the cruise ship with just 10 minutes to spare. By the time we got to the cabin, the boat was setting out, meaning the borrowed wheelchair would have to find its way back to port another day.

Struggling for Connection

Up until this point a of the trip I had gotten used to the idea that the Internet was just not particularly great. Google provides service through some local networks, which works well enough for maps and some video calls in the right environment, but the “hi-speed Internet” wifi that every hotel advertises is an absolute joke. Uploading a single image to a Discord channel is like trying to shove molasses through your phone. It’s hardly worth the time. But what they lack in speed they utterly disappoint for in stability. Your device won’t even believe the connection is real when you get capped down to 0.5 Mbps. The boat was no different for on-board wifi, but the cellular connection was suddenly, though intermittently, fantastic, allowing me to upload a few albums for later use and to have a nice long chat with my wife and kids back in the US.

Under the Sky So Blue

As we floated off on our way, my father went to sleep and I stayed up to began to watch the sun “set”, really just eager to see if it actually would fall beneath the horizon before popping back up into view, or if the glowing orb we must partly thank for our existence would leer at us the whole way around the North Sea.

There was quite a lot of photo taking before an after dinner. A truly excessive amount, in fact. Much like the first, much shorter cruise through the fjord to Gudvangen, every direction was just lousy with pretty things to see, to the point of being almost obnoxious. Eventually one gives up and just lets their own eyeballs just absorb the images for themselves, leaving the images to become memories rather than memory.

Shortly after the boat left Stavanger, I was writing up much of the text up to this point (the boat provided me with plenty of downtime). While writing, I heard a clang and then watched a red frisbee-like object fly past my window against the background of the setting sun, crashing into the water to get thrashed about in the wake of the massive cruise ship. The youthful screaming from above began instantly, piercing the thick windows of our cabin, and went on for minutes. I felt a pang of miserable empathy flow through me, imagining the parents having to hold the child back from trying to hurl themselves over after it, or trying in futility to explain that the item was now lost to the sea and will need to be replaced at some later time. I did not envy my invisible peers in parenthood. Don’t take out your toys on the boat, kids. Some of us learn the hard way.

I took out the tiny complimentary mini fridge wine bottle and toasted to the sun.

Soon after, the resident of the next cabin over suddenly appeared in their bay window, looking at me and yelling while dancing and waving around their own mini fridge wine sample. I decided to slink back from my window out of their view, leaving the sun to its parabolic path out of sight while I processed more photos from the trip so far. The room next door proceeded to produce some rather middling kinds of screams for unknown reasons. Not fun time screaming, but also not “I’m getting murdered, please help screaming.” Just inert, emotionless noise with no ascertainable purpose, but alright already, we all floated on anyway.

By the time I was ready to give up and try to sleep, the a haze of cloud cover was obscuring the sun, but based on the various times throughout the night I woke up, the blue glow of the sky never faded to anything remotely close to black.

The next day we awoke to find us approaching Denmark. After breakfast my father summoned the ambition to go to the top deck, getting some sea air. The seating area featured exclusively very low-to-the-ground couches, which was less than ideal, and while we waited for the majority of passengers to disembark for wherever else in Europe they were heading, we used the time to make our way back down to our room.

An hour before arriving in Kristiansand, we discovered we were being kicked out of our room so they could clean it. I must have missed an announcement, but given the quick turnaround they seem to have for these cruises, I understand why they’d want us out early. We hurriedly packed up our things and waited below for the ship to finally dock and for us to find our way off.

One more creepy liminal space before we go.

Finding the right spot to leave was oddly confusing, but eventually we go rerouted with a few other accessibility-curious folks to an elevator, bringing us down to the cargo bay. The staff were kind enough to taxi us down to the boat terminal. It wasn’t the most convenient place, but at least now we had our feet on the ground in Kristiansand, though now we were on our own again.

Concluded in Part 4…

…Norway, Somewhat Slowly. (Part 2)

Here’s part 2 of our Norway travel notes.

A Fairly Fleeting Float through the Fjord – Flåm to Gudvangen

After waiting awhile in Flåm, getting rained on, then getting into a line for waiting so we could get into another line for boarding, the fjord cruise was finally in motion. My father was happy to park himself in a comfortable spot and watch the scenery go by while I darted around on deck to take pictures of everything. It was here that I came to realize that this country is obnoxiously beautiful. Every rock and tree and waterfall and quaint little adorable building seems photo worthy, which leads one to not really be sure where to point your camera. I shotgunned everything I could, thankfully realizing halfway through I wasn’t shooting in RAW photo mode, but not realizing that my wide angle lens was capping my resolution at 10 megapixels. Still, I’m happy with how those photos turned out, but for the rest of the trip relied on my 35mm and stock 24~105mm lenses.

Our time in Gudvangen was short, but fraught with initial panic. The hotel was much farther away than my father would be able to deal with, and after calling the hotel they seemed to think we didn’t need a car, no matter what. It took them awhile to realize that I had unknowingly booked the father out hotel, but they were the owner of both, and after some time in their office they emerged to hand us a key to a different room, literally feet from where we were standing, and a few tickets for breakfast into the bargain, apparently because I had booked a room for each of us and now we were to share a single room. We gladly accepted their adjustment and, after some profuse thanking, had dinner and tried to sleep.

A difficult thing sleep is when your hotel room has a built in skylight that cannot close and the sun never really quite sets. A dull blue haze flooded the room throughout the night. The hotel was supplied with night masks, but given my head is rather larger than a normal person, in at minimum the literal sense, I couldn’t get used to the sensation of being weakly crushed by the elastic around my head to get a decent night’s sleep. I did eventually get a few hours, which I was thankful for, after eventually fidgeting into a position where a pillow and/or blanket was sufficiently blocking the light.

Voss Now

We woke up and I started scoping out the buses, trying to figure out where the bus would come around to pick us up. After some research I found the stop was much farther away than expected, but we were kindly given a lift by the hotel staff to our bus stop for the next leg of the journey. We learned the hotel owner was Olaf and the receptionist was Renée, which I made a point to remember. Our bus to Voss made it to our next destination without further incident.

Voss is a beautiful little town. Idylic to the point of being saccharine, at least in the summer. With only 16,000 people, it seems to be mostly a tourist transport hub, with people stopping to connect trains or coming to take the gondola up to the mountain so they can jump off of it with parachutes. There’s a small downtown center with an ancient church that seems to be the town’s centerpiece.

With some time before our hotel’s check in, we hired a taxi to take us around. Normally this would be a more general tourism maneuver, but my father had a few locations in mind. We drove around the lake and down to the Winsand farmhouse cluster, the birthplace of my great grandmother Judith Borghild Windsand, and the Rokne farm, the location of a somewhat distant cousin, Knut Rokne. I made a few efforts to be sure my father didn’t want to try to talk to any of the current residents there, but he seemed completely content with just finally having seen these places with his own eyes. Given the amount of time since any of our relatives had been here (his own mother hadn’t even made it as far as Voss in her visits to Norway more than 40 years prior) it was safe to say we’d just cause some confusion. I imagine if any one of them find photos of my father in front of their house here, that will be confusing enough.

Once our lap around the lake was done, we checked out the church, got a bunch of photos, and finally went to the hotel. We stayed at the historic Fletcher’s Hotel, which looks and feels straight out of the 1800s. We settled in and then went downstairs for dinner, where I tried to get the bartender to make me my favorite nerd drink, but they had 1 out of 4 ingredients. Still, they gave it a shot, and the result was a fine effort. The next bartender to appear asked what the odd thing on our tab was, and I explained it was a “Cosmo Canyon,” which he immediately recognized as the thing from Final Fantasy VII. All of our exchanges after that point were about geeking out over the game and its newer remakes. A fully unexpected set of interactions.

After our dinner ended I took a stroll around the town, checking out various streets and places well beyond the other end of the train station. Initially I wandered around the lake, starting at a “culture house” that had some kind of seminar going on, and finding my first few example of… fake graffiti? I encountered a lot of this kind of “graffiti” on the trip that looked a little too well-planned and clean.

In my wanderings I ran across a host of people enjoying the mild summer and found a lot of a particular kind of bird I couldn’t personally identify. The mostly black, striped birds were rather striking, and didn’t seem overly shy. The seagulls, however, seemed to think I was an intruder, and at one point took such offense at my presence that I found myself ducking behind the corner of a building to escape their inexplicable wrath.

I’m certain I confused a fair number of folks, trekking into places the normal tourist probably wouldn’t bother to go, but go I did, taking random photos of whatever I came across. Once I had gone high enough up the hillside that I was certain the only good way down was back the way I came, I turned back and went back to the hotel.

Another seagull that seemed insulted by my presence.

In the morning we walked out to the little park in front of the hotel to pose with a statue of Knut Rokne (Knute Rockne in the US), an early 1900s football player/coach who resides on our family tree as some degree of cousin to my father. The resemblance is certainly there.

After that we had quite a lot of time to burn. I wasn’t sure how much family history we’d be getting into, so I baked in a lot of extra time in Voss we ended up not needing. We decided to buy tickets for an earlier train, sacrificing our repurchased seats. The new tickets were nearly half the price of the old ones, a function either of the time of the departure or that Rail Ninja may have been ripping me off from the start. I guess with a name like “Rail Ninja” I shouldn’t have trusted them in the first place.

The gondola leads up to a place simply called “Hangurstoppen” which isn’t particularly inspired as names for places go. Oddly I didn’t seen much evidence that naming mountains is a thing that happens in these parts, probably due to the excessive number of them. If every impressive looking rock had a name they’d probably struggle to come up with new ones for them. I’m guessing they wait for one of them to explode and destroy a small town before granting it specific moniker.

I wandered around the top of the hill for a time, taking photos of the scenery far below. I learned a few things about mountain tops I hadn’t considered. Mainly, they’re covered in swamps and flies that seemed rather fond of the citrus-themed shampoo and body wash the hotel had provided. They were annoying, but not annoying enough to stop me from getting my photographs before we went back down to the town. The most amusing event was a group of Japanese tourists showing up and seeming to mistake my father as one of the locals, getting a photo posing with him. Truly astounding.

Overall, sleepy as the town was, it made me wonder just how amazing the promise of American prosperity must have been 150 years ago to make anyone want to pack up and leave such a place. If I were growing up in Voss, or in nearly any other town that I’ve seen on this trip, and I had access to heating, air conditioning, and gigabit Internet, I’d absolutely never leave.

Continued in Part 3…

…Norway, Somewhat Slowly. (Part 1)

My family tree is all over the place, and not always in the places it seems like it should be. The Scandinavian bits all seem to come from my father’s side, though any direct connections left for America 120 years ago. Still, he’s been diving deep into our ancestry in the last few years. He’s always had his eye on Norway. In particular, he’s often returned to a website about a specific part of Norway. Since the dawn of Internet webcams, he’s been spying on Voss Now, a website hosting webcams overlooking the little town of Voss. The town has ballooned in modern day to a population of 16,000 people. We have shadows of distant relatives in that town, and while most of the family uprooted and moved to the United States long ago, he kept returning to that site in periodic curiosity. Earlier this year I finally convinced him, in spite of his apprehensions about air travel, that we should finally go and see the place, and much of the surroundings, now that we had the means. So here’s the record of our June trip, a slow-paced version of the famed (or at least much-advertised) “Norway in a Nutshell” tour.

“Norway in a Nutshell” is generally experienced as a 1-day tour of a set of hot spots in the southern part of the country, where most major city centers are. One travels by train from Oslo to Myrdal, Myrdal to Flåm, by boat through a beautiful set of fjords to Gudvangen, then by bus to Voss, train to Bergen, and then back to Oslo. According to various Internet sources, many prefer a leisurely 2 to 3 day version of this. I knew that was still going to be a little fast paced, so I planned out an extended 9-day version, spending a night in nearly every traditional stop, and adding a cruise from Bergen to Kristansand in-between the return from Bergen to Oslo. As is my way, I planned everything in a spreadsheet and picked out the best time slots to get us from place to place as I could while not rushing us too much. Once I plotted it all out I made the reservations and set out waiting for the dates of our trip to approach. Surely everything would go according to plan.

This first part will be mostly the lead in to getting there, with more photos in the next installments.

Flight of Fancy and Not-So Fancy Chairs

What I expected to be the main challenge would be the very start of the trip. I couldn’t predict how painful the flights within Europe would be as the seating charts were for some reason hidden from me. Our seats on Delta were going to be comfortable enough, but the plane would still have torture chambers for restrooms. I wasn’t sure how tired we’d be, or if we could wake up early enough for the 6:30am train. On the way to the airport it became apparent that we would want to utilize wheel chairs whenever possible.

We made it to the flight with time to spare, eventually boarded, and things seemed fine. We were in what used to be called “business class”, which meant more than sufficient legroom even for us. However, the aforementioned torture restrooms would wreak havoc on my father’s whole existence. Even for me they were a cramped, miserable experience, forcing me to wonder why they still make them this way. Is there some mysterious benefit to having every centimeter of “wasted space” extracted from the restrooms specifically? Would the sacrifice of maybe a single row of seating for the sake for adding 50% more square footage really be so terrible? Wouldn’t everyone be happier and more comfortable that way? For the staff, too? Why is this still a problem?

Anyway, it was bad. The restroom was bad. Apart from that the rest of the flight to Amsterdam was fine. The connecting flight on SAS was tolerable, but less comfortable. The staff were kind enough to schedule a wheel chair for us, but there’s not much to be done for people our size in “normal” airline seats. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any difference in legroom between seat “tiers,” the only difference being food/drink service and getting smiled at more if you wanted to pay more for that.

Oslo and Out

When we finally landed we got an escort to the taxi pickup area. I was amused that customs here amounted to a glowing green gate, which you walk through signifying you had nothing to declare. No interrogation, no beefy military-looking person waiting to grill you on the contents of your bags, not even a demand to pose for a photograph. Just a big glowing doorway that said “you’re probably not a liar, enjoy your stay” without the need for direct interaction.

We got a taxi to the hotel and proceeded to eat our first bit of local cuisine: cheeseburgers. That seemed like a silly thing to do, but they were some fantastic burgers, which we ordered just under the wire for the kitchen’s service hours.

After heading to the room, the next trial loomed over us. I had booked an early train to Myrdal, worried about possible delays. Though generally I tried to play it safe with bookings, I took a risk with that one. Could we wake up in time? That was my original concern, but we were able to wake up pretty early, which should have been fine. It turned out we were more limited in terms of maximum walking range than I had expected, so we had to make our way with taxis.

The taxi in Oslo had a baked in insistence on picking us up in a predetermined location. This appears to be some mandate from the city here that taxis and Ubers and the like can only stop for pickup at specific points on the map. We were close to one of those points, but not conveniently close. We eventually got in the cab, then watched from the back seat as the driver seemed to meander around the town, ignoring the advice of their own GPS instructions in front of them, and eventually getting us to the station in time to not be able to make it to the train platform.

This was a fairly major issue, and mucked with my calculation of the whole trip. I hurriedly tried to find an alternative transport to get us where we were going. Myrdal and the Flåm train line were cute, but the priority was making sure we could get to the cruise in Flåm in time, as it would take us to our second hotel. The Entur app, the apparent overlord of train reservations for this region, wanted to make me think I could buy tickets for the next train, showing a friendly, glowing, select-able time slot at prices I was more than willing to pay to get us on track, but each time I tried to buy the tickets I got an error message.

After waiting for the service desk to open, I was sternly told the train was sold out and they weren’t sure why the app was pretending it wasn’t. So we were going to have to take a bus, if one was available, or the whole schedule would be upended. This meant skipping Myrdal (which according to the locals has nothing to see anyway) and the train to Flåm (which would have been cute, but not essential).

Getting there would be half the fun if the world was made to accommodate people over 6’3″.

The Bus Less Traveled – Oslo to Flåm

The bus station was “nearby,” but getting to and through it was still quite a trek. After getting across a small bridge between the train station and the bus stations, I left to scout ahead. The internal area was one long path, much longer than I expected. Thankfully the agents had a wheelchair I could use to bring him through the terminal and to the bus.

We boarded the bus, gladly on time, only to be delayed by a different set of passengers with their own, even more severe, mobility issues. It took them 15 minutes to board the bus, which put us well behind schedule, and to get to Flåm on time we would need to make a connection to another bus on the way.

We rode the bus until those folks got off, then father north we went. Around 20 minutes before our arrival, and 5 minutes before our connection was due to leave, I finally overheard the driver talking on the phone. My ear for Norwegian is untrained, but I was able to make out several utterances of “ti minutter” and “tjue minutter,” so I was fairly confident they were talking about our impending lateness. A few minutes later, the driver announced for us in English what was happening, and validating my guess: The next bus wasn’t going to leave without us.

Continued in Part 2…