Olso Mania

    Where to begin?! Perhaps at the beginning...5 AM Saturday wake up. 6:16 AM
The Blue Star Bus arrives. Van ride a la high school. Sitting in the back, way back bench.
Can't beat the price, however. Plastic bag our wedding-era backpacks (right, just a year old).
TSA spots an illegal Cream in chris' bag. Flaxseed rub he borrowed from Barry Bonds? No,his six pound jar of peanut butter.
Nearly came to blows. Only upside is his bag is dramatically lighter.

Nothing wild about the flight to Chicago. Sally sat next to a fairly dramatic woman who was extremely uncomfortable in her seat. Sally was more than aware of this problem. Nearly came to blows.

Chicago to London. Managed to land in the exit row bulkhead having somehow had two seats at opposite ends of the plane.
Gave the booking agent a huge hug. Ate surprisingly well on the flight. I had this Indian dish and Sally a taste of Italia with stuffed shells.
However despite being full we slept not at all. Too much on our minds...

London Heathrow to Oslo. Got some much needed winks in the airport and on the plane.

Oslo. Architects dream. Airport. No detail left behind. Form and function in every aspect. Have some pictures but may be a few days before we can download...

Skipping ahead - into Oslo - find out hotel which happens to be in the Embassy district. Major houses and beautiful colorful streets of formidable stone buldings. Serious goodness. Landed our gear in our fine hotel and headed to get some local tourist beta.

Turns out there is a bike rental system. Highly practical and fun. So we signed up - $12 each for 24 hours - and started toward a very funky part of town up the Aker River to find the purportedly best pizza in Norway. We have a thing for pizza. These bikes are a riot. 3 gears. Really stout. Usually with some minor ailment. And logically Oslo has tons of bike lanes, even though we'd often just ride down the center of the road. ; )

Pizza and several flea markets later, we headed back to home base, batteries running very low.
Sally zonked at 8. I followed shortly thereafter. Day 1 being the
Better part of 48 hours.

Day 2. Today. Needs serious photo emBELLishment. To come. Breakfast of champions. The spread was, how do you say in Norge, fregengud!! Tons of this and that. So chris piled on plates of bread, swedish pancakes and norwegian forest berry treats. Sally dined on Lox and Lox of tasty fish and musleix.

From there, we rolled downhill to our bikes and headed to the Viking ships! Quite possibly the coolest museum building - accented the ships perfectly- we saw three burial ships that we unearthed ('were', that would have been a lot of work for this morning) you had the visual of what scale these were and a lot ofthe itemsthat accompanied this incredible age of dominace. Without these ships-no Vikings. Or at least not In places like Greenland. Just the right punt of information and stuff to see. We hit it right. Soon the massive euro tour buses landed and you could barely scratch yourself (without running the risk of improperly scratching someone else). From there we hit the beach and witnessed a little nude bathing. Quite amusing as the nudist colony consisted of 3 and 5 year olde running wild. Lots of laughs.

From there we did a picnic lunch up at Vigeland Park. Again, incredible attention to detail. A massive park containing the work of a single artist who depicted humans in their natural state - full of play and fun and yet hugely dramatic setting and design. Picutes, once posted, will 'splain ( inside sally chris joke- 'splain me' was famously uttered by our south American ski touring guide winter before last - man named Chago).

From there we hit the DNT to get our hut to hut hiking trip
Squared away - DNT is the hut system and hiking org of Norway that has an office in Oslo - then did hit the hotel for some down two while it poured rain - and got some groceries - tell me you don't love explorig foreign grocery stores? Total riot. Ran into a gluten and wheat intolerant Portuguese man who contintually asked us to read the labels. With bad breath. We did our best to track down the ingrediants and not pass out.

Oslo opera house. Insane. Hour? Late. Sally said last call for blogging was an hour ago. Night all. Sending warm Norwegian sweater hugs to all.