August 3, 2015

First off…how in the world is it already August?!?!  Time is going by so quickly and I’m getting a little depressed at the fact that we are going to have to come home eventually.  😦  On the one hand, it will be nice to get back to the US, but on the other there is still SO MUCH to see and I feel like we haven’t hardly scratched the surface.  Every where we go, we find more things we want to do in the future!  I already want to start planning our next trip.

We are currently sitting on a train departing Norway and making our way down to Amsterdam.  Unfortunately, it’s a LONG trip, but we’re breaking it up into a few days.  We left Oslo this morning and we will get to Hamburg, Germany tonight.  Tomorrow, we will finish the trip and make it all the way to Amsterdam where we are going to stay for just under a week or so.

We had a great time in Norway, despite the fact that it was cold and expensive!  When we got off of the train, it was so cold that Hayden had to take a pair of his socks and use them as gloves…lol.  Any place that has a high of 60 degrees in July/August is way too cold for us!  It’s beautiful to visit, but I can’t imagine living here (especially in the winter!).  On top of the cold, it is crazy expensive.  We were camping, which wasn’t bad, but the hotels are insane and food is ridiculously expensive too.  It would definitely be easy to blow a budget here!

We arrived and got checked into our campsite before heading out to check out the town and find some dinner.  Oslo is beautiful and a great city to walk around.  We found a “cheap” place to eat some dinner and just got our bearings for the next few days.

The problem with camping in Norway is that it is light almost 24 hours a day, so a light weight tent doesn’t do anything to block the sun.  It was still a little light at midnight and the sun was up again by 3:00 am.  This did make it easy to get an early start on the day.  We spent the next day visiting some museums and walking around the city of Oslo.  We started the morning going down to the waterfront, which was beautiful.  There are lots of really neat old buildings with some cool new buildings mixed in as well.  The flowers and park areas around the city are kept up very nicely and are really pretty to walk through.  After getting to the ferries and realizing that our tickets didn’t work for the ferry, we ended up just taking the bus out to museum island.  We started at The Fram Museum.  The Fram was the first ship to sail to the Arctic and it also sailed to the South Pole.  The museum had the actual ship inside and lots of great exhibits about all of the different expeditions that it took.  It was really interesting.

At the museum, Hayden decided that he is going to plan his own trip to the Arctic.  He said that he is going to take his friends and they are going to do their own exploration.  He said not to worry, they will only be gone about 6 weeks or so.  He’s planning to start working on his ship when we get home.  🙂

After the Fram Museum, we were planning to go to the Viking Ship Museum, but it was $25 to get in and it turned out to be really small, so we decided to skip it and spend the time in the city instead.  We ended up walking through the Royal Palace gardens and getting a little lost in town.  It worked out well because we hung around downtown to get dinner before going back to the campsite.  Adam and Hayden were really excited that we found a giant statue of Thor’s Hammer which they tried to pick up, but didn’t have any luck.  🙂

We got back to the campsite at a decent time, but unfortuenly, it absolutely poored rain over night!  Our trusty REI tent did great, but everything was soaked on the outside.  We had to wrap up the tent all wet and hope to get to dry it later.

The next day, we got out of Oslo and headed towards the West coast of the country towards the fjords.  It was a long, but very beautiful train ride.  I wish that the pictures could fully capture how pretty it was.  Here are several pictures from along the train route.

We got to Myrdal where we got off of the train and went in search of some snow to play in.  Hayden REALLY wanted to get to snow, so after a quick climb (and a bit of a fall into a creek), we found snow!  We had a great time playing, having a snowball fight, and making snow angels before we had to get back for the next train.

After a quick change of socks and shoes (he was soaking from falling in the creek), we were on the next train and ready for more riding.  The trains in Europe are awesome…the trains here in particular were great.  They have a family care with a large play area for kids during the ride.  Hayden spent the entire trip in the play-scape and I even found him in the corner taking a nap at one point…he played himself all out!

With our very wet tent still stuffed in the backpack, we decided to splurge a little and get a hotel room last night so that we could let everything dry out.  We also weren’t sure of the weather forecast and we didn’t want to get everything even wetter when we had to take a long train the following day.  The hotel turned out to be very comfortable and not a bad deal.  We got a chance to sleep in a bed and to get everything dried out.

This morning, we got to the train station first thing and are heading to Amsterdam.  We will get there tomorrow night after a stop-over in Hamburg, Germany this evening.  We are planning to spend 5 days or so in Amsterdam and then head back to Germany from there.