While we have taken some awesome trips in the last 5 years, it’s been nearly that long since we’ve done something significant enough to revive this blog.
And even this trip started as something completely different. We’ve always wanted to do a river cruise and started talking about with our friends Tim & Nan Borer (who put our traveling to shame). Somehow it morphed into two weeks in Norway and here we are.
After packing and unpacking for more than a month we launched out this morning, leaving the house around 8 am and bidding our dear pups a “see ya soon!” I think we’d both say leaving the two of them has been tough, but they are in good hands with our sitter Chlöe.
In general the trip went fine, except that Finnair changed the seats we had booked months ago – with extra legroom, a Tom fave – to a much less desirable location. The good part was we had three seats to ourselves, so that helped.
Our route took us from Detroit to Dallas to Helsinki (practically flying right back over Detroit…) to Oslo resulting in a VERY long day. On arrival, Robin was sorely disappointed – and Tom, relieved – when Norwegian customs agents didn’t confiscate Tom’s tobacco. But not to worry, he will catch shit for it the whole trip – if it doesn’t “mysteriously” go missing along the way…
We arrived to a very spare hotel in Oslo (but in a great location), took an hour break to get out of wet clothes and rest a bit before heading out to explore the neighborhood. Oslo’s downtown is quite vibrant, and after some window shopping and people watching, we walked over to the spectacular Oslo Opera House, which happens to have been designed by the same architectural firm that designed the Wolfe Center for the Arts on the BGSU campus!
We did bit more wandering, and we had a (very expensive) beer later at SALT where Ohio brewery Brewdog was represented! SALT is a cool, funky place right on the waterfront where they do a lot of performance art.
(A quick aside, that “very expensive” comment will hopefully be the last remark we make about the high price of beer here, which is apparently a very “touristy” thing to do…)
Then, we found a quirky taco place in a food court under the Rodeo Drive of Oslo. Hiding beneath the Chanel, Hermes, and Louis Vuitton shops was the Los Taco Steen & Strøm restaurant where the tacos were pretty damn tasty and the beer was (relatively) cheap!
(Damn, I did it again…)
But still, a nice way to end the first day.
