With the flight going overnight, lack of sleep and time zone changes, I think this is the third day of our trip, but I’m not sure how well I’d do on a polygraph test if you asked me that question. Regardless of the day, I’ve tried to squeeze everything into these journal entries that I’ve been writing for the sake of our trip, but who knows? Maybe posterity will get something out of my posting this stuff on the Internet. Or maybe it’ll just save me time and effort to fill my friends in on the details of my trip.
Morning:
So far, we’re batting .000 for reservations, which started with the airplane. We also discovered that Icelandair’s definition of “7:20 departure on time” directly translates to “You may or may not be off the ground by 8:15”.
However! Upon boarding the plane, there was a little tent between the Economy Comfort seats where we’d reserved our seats:
“Dear Guest, you have been upgraded to a seat that under normal circumstances would be assigned to Saga Class. Enjoy!”
Consequently, we had biiiiiig seats. Even with a window seat, there was enough room underneath the seat in front of me that I could stretch out my legs without needing the aisle to do it. There was more space, the service was better, the food was yummy… they didn’t give us warm towels to wash our hands after the meal, but we survived.
We landed and got our luggage with no problem, but upon reaching the car rental desk, *swoosh*, another strike! Instead of a Ford Focus or some similar Volkswagen car like our reservation indicated, they gave us a Suzuki 4×4 or something. I’m not sure exactly what it’s called, but there’s no trunk (which is one thing we wanted) and there’s not a lot of extra room for luggage (which is something we’ll need, especially when Dad gets here on August 8th). Still, it’s an automatic and we figured out how to make it run. It could be worse: it could be a Fred Flintstone car where you have to push it with your feet.
Then it was time to hit the road and go to the Oslo Botanical Garden. We were using the netbook, which has all of the directions written out and maps showing the routes we’re supposed to take during the course of our stay here, but the navigator has to read it and that navigator is me. Disaster was imminent.
Things were fine initially until we saw a sign indicating a town, Drammen, where we were supposed to go. What didn’t click was that the road it was pointing toward was not the road we were supposed to use. Consequently, when we turned… the map didn’t show where we were. Crap.
So we kept driving down this wrong road for a while and eventually saw a sign of another city we were planning to visit. Tomorrow. Still, it was better than being lost, so instead of the Botanical Garden, we stopped at the Vikingskipshuset. There were three Viking ships that had been unearthed and extremely well-preserved in the museum. Long boats, some wagons and a burial tent (the boat with the tent would likely have had dogs, horses, gold, silver, etc. along with it—the Vikings gotta have the bare essentials when they’re dead and get put out to sea in a flaming ship). Oh, and those boats had some majorly intricate carvings and hadn’t worn off, which is pretty impressive when you consider that two of them date back to the 9th century.
Here’s the official entry from the Oslo Guide 2010 we found in the lobby of our hotel: “THE VIKING SHIP MUSEUM houses the Gokstad Ship, the Oseberg Ship and the Tune Ship which are the best preserved Viking ships. They were found in three royal burial mounds along the Oslo Fjord. Here the ships had been buried for more than 1100 years to serve as vessels for their royal owners’ final journey to the realm of the dead. The exhibitions also display the ships’ skeletons, the wagon, the sledges and other artifacts from the graves.”
From there, we moved on the Vigelandsparken, “a unique sculpture park [that] is the life work of the sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943) with more than 200 sculptures in bronze, granite and cast iron. Vigeland was also responsible for the design and architectural outline of the park,” although he didn’t design all the girls in bikinis who were lounging around in the warm, sunny weather that day.
And then it was time to find the hotel. We managed to reverse the directions on the next day’s map to get there after a lot more wrong turns, but we did get there eventually. It looked like we were sitting in a handicapped parking space in front of the hotel, so I waited in the car as Mom went inside and *swoosh*, called third strike! They said we didn’t have a reservation.
Thankfully, Mom had all of our reservation information copied onto the netbook as well, so she grabbed that from the car, went back inside and viola! We got our hotel room. Thank God for that much.
Not a whole lot happened after that. We went across the street for dinner (it was a little place that had mostly snack-type food, but we both got a salmon sandwich that was pretty good). I was already doing the tired-head bob while waiting for our food, so when we got back to the hotel, I crashed. Without much sleep for the past… flying seven time zones away from home has kind of messed with my time perspective, but it wasn’t much sleep for a long time and “crashed” is definitely the right word for it. I stayed up just long enough to send an e-mail home to let people know we got here safely, then went to bed. That was some gooood sleep.
Now we’re here for two more days with not a lot to do. There are a few places we’re planning to walk to, but overall, I’m sure it will be much less eventful than the last 48 hours or so, which is just fine with me. Time for the continental breakfast and then hit the road. Or at least step on it a bunch of times.
