Oslo to Flam - Day 6

On Day 6, we drove from Oslo to Flam, which is in the Hardanger fjord. We took the scenic route so we could see as much as possible of the fjords. The landscape is incredible! The photos don't quite capture the scale of these mountains. I think we may have seen at least 75-100 waterfalls along the way. We stopped in Flam for the night, spending the night in the Flamsbrygga hotel, which is the only hotel in Flam. We also ate dinner in their brewery/pub restaurant, where they brew their own beer. It was a long day of driving! Ben has done all of the driving so far and I have been navigating. Driving through the mountains has required us to use the GearTronic feature, allowing us to change to manual to better drive in the mountains, and I don't know how to drive in manual. We basically drove from 8-8, but it was a lovely drive.

Bathroom/Coke stop. We were shown to the "toalette" upstairs where it appeared they do some sort of gambling related to horses. A bit sketchy, but I think I have been to worse.

Second bathroom stop. There are several picnic/wc rest stops along the historic route we were driving.

Little town

High, curvy, one-lane road

Pretty waterfall. We are standing on top of this waterfall in the photo of us below.

First waterfall of many we saw along the way

Huge waterfall that goes under the bridge

One of the larger towns we passed through on the way to Flam.

We passed many small towns tucked away in the mountains.

Little town along the way

Cherry/plum fields. This region supplies 40% of all fruit produced in Norway.

Cafe in Kinsarvik

Our ferry in the distance

On the ferry to other side of fjord

Church in Kinsarvik

On top of a waterfall

Driving around a curve. Roads are basically one and a half lanes, with blind turns like this one. These people drive FAST and don't even slow down around the curves. It can get a bit hairy when the vehicle zooming around the other side is an 18-wheeler!

Crazy waterfalls

View from our hotel room in Flam

Oslo - Day 5

It has been a long day of sightseeing, so this is going to be a post with mostly pictures. We walked, and walked, and walked today. I have some nasty blisters to prove it! I also ended up with hives by the end of the day on my legs!

The boat we rode over to the Viking Museum.

Waiting on the boat back to City Hall.

Excavated Viking ship

Oslo Opera House

You can walk up side to the roof of the opera house.

Inside of Opera House

View of Opera House from pedestrian bridge

This building is some sort of teacher's alliance/education related. The glass is covered in letters and numbers.

Frogner Park

Another view of Frogner Park

Crazy high ski jump

Bottom part of ski jump

On the mountain, walking back to train from ski jump.

Swing dancing party in the harbour tonight

Royal Palace

View from top of opera house

View of Oslo from water

Looking down on Oslo

We are headed through the fjords to Flam tomorrow morning.

Gothenburg-Day 4: Car-pick up day!

Gothenburg – Day 4

Last night we arrived in Gothenburg. After locating our hotel, we walked over to a restaurant we had decided on before coming on the trip called Sense. It had so-so reviews on TripAdvisor, but most of the negativity related to the service, so we decided to go anyway because we didn’t feel like looking for something else. It turned out to be a very nice little restaurant, with great food. Unfortunately, the reviews were correct. Super-slow service! We were there over 2 hours. Our server was very nice, but he was also working in the kitchen. After dinner, we went back to the hotel and got ready for car pick-up day!

Sense - restaurant

We had breakfast in the hotel this morning and then a taxi picked us up at 8 and took us straight to the Volvo delivery center. Once we got there, we went over some paperwork with our delivery agent Emelie, like our insurance while we are here. Then she drove our car out! We were the second delivery of the day. She showed us all the features of the car and how to use them.

Volvo delivery center

After we got our car, we drove it around the “test track,” which was just a little loop in front of the Volvo center. We then drove it over to the Volvo museum, where we got to see the history of Volvo. It was interesting to see all of the old cars. When we finished touring the museum, we headed back to the delivery center, where we were given lunch. Lunch was Swedish meatballs and boiled potatoes. After lunch, we were able to take a factory tour. For the tour, we rode on a tram similar to the ones in the parking lots at Disney World. It was fascinating to see how they made the cars using the assembly line and all of the machines.

XC-60!

After the tour, we got on the road to Oslo, which is about a 3 hour drive. There were several detours we had to take, but we made it to the city ok. Once we got to the city…a different story. There are several long tunnels that have exits in the tunnel. We missed out turn because we lost satellite reception in the tunnel, and turning around isn’t particularly easy. After we went through about 5 different round-abouts two times each, we finally made it to the hotel. We had to park the car in a parking deck a few blocks away, as we thought the hotel we are staying in didn’t have parking.

I’ll update about Oslo tomorrow. For now, I need to sleep. In a room without air conditioning….

Stockholm Day 3

After a good night of rest, we got up and headed out for more sightseeing. After checking out of the hotel and storing our luggage, we headed back toward Gamla Stan. On the way there, we saw the Royal Palace, Cathedral, and Parliament building. As we were walking up the side of the palace, we noticed a royal military guard. She was fiddling around, but when Ben went to take her picture, she stood straight up and still. Then she decided to do some sort of marching in a line thing with her sword, which was interesting. From here, we wandered around through Gamla Stan a little more. We were looking for breakfast, and found a café that listed cinnamon rolls and appeared to be open, but they weren’t, despite the serving window being open. Instead of waiting, we kept on walking.

We left Gamla Stan and walked over the bridge to Sodermalm, where we found a McDonalds. Not quite to local bakery we were looking for, but we were hungry, so we stopped there and split an egg mcmuffin and a potato cake. After breakfast, we began our Millennium tour by climbing the longest staircase ever. I had to stop and catch my breath a few times. When we made it to the top, there was a really good view of Stockholm. The majority of the stops on the tour were on Sodermalm, which is an island of Stockholm that is very residential and non-touristy. The tour stops included Lisbeth Salander’s old and new apartments, Blomkvist’s apartment, the Millennium offices, and the 7/11 where Salander shopped, as well as some other locations mentioned in the book. After doing the walking tour ourselves, we were glad we didn’t do the guided tour because we were able to stop or wander as we pleased. Sodermalm is beautiful and the views are amazing. Definitely my favorite part of Stockholm.

Royal Palace on right with palace guard in blue. Cathedral on left.

Fiskargatan. Where Salander bought her new apartment.

View of Stockholm from Sodermalm.

Steep cobblestone street in Sodermalm.

Blomkvist's apartment in Sodermalm.

After completing the tour, we zoomed back to Gamla Stan to catch one of the boat tours, except there was some sort of bike race going on all day, so we ended up on the wrong side of the road from the boat ticketing place, so we had to wait for breaks between bikes. Once we finally made it to the ticketing place, we discovered that we had gone to the wrong one for the tour we wanted to take. Darn. So, we gave up on the boat tour. We were tired and hungry, so we walked to this café we saw the day before for lunch.

Following lunch, we walked back to the hotel and grabbed our luggage, and then headed toward the train station for our 3:00 speed train to Gothenburg. The train ride was relaxing. I blogged and downloaded pictures as we rode through the Swedish countryside.

Train station.

View of Sodermalm behind us.

Now we are in Gothenburg. I need to go to bed because tomorrow is a big day! Volvo will pick us up at 8:00 and then we will get our car!! I’ll update again tomorrow (hopefully!).

Observations

Converse are very popular, as are leggings and tight jeans.

Lots of blond people. Even more blond kids. I fit right in. In fact, I’ve been addressed in Swedish everytime I try to talk to someone. Ben is addressed in English.

There is a 25% tax on all purchases, which is included in advertised prices.

Tipping is not expected, but welcomed. It is not considered rude to not tip. If you do tip, it seems the going rate is about 10%.

Swedish people like to wear jackets. Khaki, trench, and lots of leather jackets, even if it is warm.

We’ve run across a few particularly stinky folks. Ben attributes this to their fondness for jackets in warm weather and apparent disdain for air conditioning.

Swedish people must not be too concerned about making money. Everything opens late and closes early. We saw a store with an hours sign that listed hours for Wednesday-Saturday, but said “sometimes” for Sunday-Tuesday.

The teenagers here seem to like American baseball, or at least wearing American baseball team hats. We’ve seen several LA Dodgers hats, as well as one Braves hat.

See? Tight jeans (tights?) and jackets. Lots of Keds style shoes, too.

Stockholm!

Day 1 & 2

We left Atlanta around 11:00 and landed in Chicago 2 hours later. Since we had about 4 hours before our next flight, we decided to take a free bus to a local hotel/business area that had a Gino’s East, a Chicago-style pizza place, so we could get one last American meal before we left. We got back to the airport to spend a little time in the SAS lounge, which we got free passes to use from Volvo.

Next we boarded the plane. We were a little disappointed to find that the seats were smaller than we had expected/remembered, as well as close to the back of the plane. It was a looong flight filled with 3 crying babies and some annoying people in front of us, one of whom flipped her hair over the back of her headrest and covered my screen. Hair grosses me out something serious anyway, but she was too much. She also reached back and closed my window when I was trying to look out. We didn’t do much sleeping, but we did play a lot of Tetris. We were both pretty restless by the end of the flight! Interestingly, it never got completely dark. We could always see the sunlight on the horizon.

We arrived in Stockholm at 7:30 am local time, but 1:30 am Atlanta time, so we basically lost a night. Customs and baggage claim were a breeze, surprisingly. We were very glad all of our luggage made it here. We then took the speed train to the city. From the train station, our hotel was only a few blocks away. We dropped our luggage off since we were too early to check-in and set off to check out the city. In the rain. The weather varied between a slow steady rain, mist, and a harder steady rain. We were both glad we made the last minute decision to bring our rain boots!

We headed over to Gamla Stan (old town) to see if we could find some breakfast, which was harder than expected, since most places don’t open before 9 or 10 am. Actually, we were given breakfast on the plane, which consisted of a ham and cheese sandwich with lettuce (Ben doesn’t eat cured ham, and I don’t eat sandwiches for breakfast. Or Lettuce.), greek yogurt (we definitely don’t eat that), and some orange juice. Anyway, we wandered around in the rain, indecisive about where to go. We finally decided on Espresso House, where we had some tasty lattes and a pastry. We walked around a bit longer and attempted to go buy tickets for the guided Millenium walking tour that highlights most of the locations from the Stieg Larsson series. Except when we got the museum to buy the tickets, the girls at the counter said it was sold out. They said we could buy a map and do the tour ourselves, which is what we decided to do. By now, it was almost 12, so we decided to walk back to the tourist center to get maps and other brochures. We were almost there when the bottom dropped out. We were grouchy and it was pouring, so we turned off and headed to the hotel.

Espresso House

Rainy Stockholm

Once we got checked in, we had to wait for out luggage to be brought up. Ben and I were in a bit of a daze and just sitting in the chairs in the dark. When the luggage man showed up, he informed us that you have to put the key in the switch by the door to get the lights to come on. He must have wondered why we were sitting in the dark, but I didn’t even think to turn on the lights. Jetlag, I guess. Anyway, we decided to take a 2 hour nap. I didn’t even feel bad about it because the weather was so nasty. After the nap, we took showers and went out to dinner. We ended up going to this pub around the corner since it was raining called Pickwicke. We had planned to go to another restaurant, but after determining it was farther than we were willing to walk in the rain and a $15-$20 cab ride, changed our minds. Pickwicke wasn’t too bad. Ben had Swedish meatballs and I had lasagna. We also had a waitress that looked very similar to Pippi Longstocking.

After dinner, it had just about stopped raining, so we decided to do some exploring. We walked through the downtown area of Stockholm, where we visited a large department store that was very nice. Ben was not interested, but I definitely was. I am always interested in seeing how other people do their shopping. There was some sort of festival going on and there were lots of people. We were trying to be very careful about pick-pocketers, and once had a sketchy looking guy get too close behind us. He was fortunate he didn’t try to steal something out of my purse because I was watching him and I had my umbrella ready in my right hand to whack him upside the head.

We then headed back to the hotel, where we reorganized our luggage and got ready for the next day. We also watched a little ESPN America, where we got to watch clips from the Braves. We went to bed about 9:15 and woke up at 6:15, a much needed 10 hour rest

That's all for now! I'll be back with day 3 soon!