Ok, Oslo,  we did not get off on the right foot.  We’ve  taken some time in Bergen to cool off, and now we’re ready to give it another try.

Besides, we all have this half day to spend together, and the best thing to do is try to play nice.  In the brief time between when the night train lets us off and our cruise to Copenhagen starts boarding, we promise to uncover and enjoy some of the pleasure we know must exist somewhere within your downtown area.  And all you have to do is occupy our attention and not take up too much of our money.

Deal?

You must have some kind of attraction that open early.  Our train gets in at 6.  Maybe something outdoors.  How about a nice botanical garden that we can roam around and not bother anyone?

We can look at some flowers, take some pictures, and stretch our legs.  It has to be close enough to the train station so we can walk there.

Can you do that?  Thanks.

And while we’re outside, how about a castle or something from a long time ago that has some grounds we can explore.  We are really getting into Norwegian history.   Sprinkly it with some cannons and ancient-looking rock walls.

Maybe it can be on the water?  We don’t really want to spend much money, so maybe keep it…free?  Is that too much to ask?

I know we’re asking a lot, Norway, but that crummy hotel episode left a bad taste in our mouths.  Oh, speaking of which, we would like a quick place for lunch.

Something we haven’t had on this trip yet.  How about Middle Eastern food?  Some nice felafel and pitas.

And when we get done with that — we know this is a lot to ask —  but we’ve really been hoping to find the time for an escape room this trip.  And, we’ve got some time.

See if you can come up with something not too tricky, but tough enough to keep us occupied for an hour or so.   And put it right on the street we’re walking down.  And make sure there is a free timeslot when we need it.

And that should do it.  We’ll collect our stuff from the lockers and head off for our cruise termnal, which should be within walking distance from the train station.

Given that we’re in Scandinavia during the summer, we know it’s going to rain a little, but can you keep the percipitation to a minium.

We’ll take care of the rest.  Really.

Our cruise is booked.  We have a cabin with a window that will let us watch the coastline pass by.

We’ll be sure wave to all the Norwegians on shore as we sail past, maybe sitting the hot tub, if we’re lucky.

And then, sometime overnight, the Norwegian coastline will turn into the Danish coastline, and we’ll be completely out of your hair, Oslo.  We’ll even say some nice things about you, and maybe wish that we had  few more hours to explore your streets.

Not that we’ll think of you as fondly or as often as we’ll think of Bergen or — and we know this will hurt you — Stockholm.  But we can part as friends and get on with our busy agendas, each enriched, if only slighly, by our time together.

What do you say, Oslo?  Let’s give it a try.

 

 

It is very difficult not to like Bergen.  It’s neither too big, nor too small; neither too quiet, nor too noisy.  Like all the Scandinavian cities we’ve visited, it is very easy to navigate on foot.  It is exotic and foreign, but everyone switches to English quite cheerfully.  There is deep history and rich culture.  And most of us had not idea it existed until yesterday.

Even Jen, who did know it existed because she planned our stop here, did not quite fathom what a gem it would turn out to be.

Excited about having a whole day to explore some more, we fueled up at our hotel’s breakfast buffet.  A quick little background:  We are staying in the apartment section of the Magic Hotel in the Kloverheuset building.   There are a few other members of the Magic Hotel empire here in Bergen, and the hotel and its staff will factor pretty heavily in our enjoyment of the day, so we should slide a little publicity their way.

When we confirmed in the morning that, as apartment renters and not hotel room guests, we would have to pay for the breakfast buffet, the woman at the desk noted that the Magic Hotel on the other side of the waterfront also had a breakfast buffet. She said it was virtually the same buffet, but it was a bunch of kroner cheaper for some reason .

That’s pretty helpful information to know, we thought; and we headed over to the other Magic Hotel for breakfast.  Then we shopped a bit along the Bryggen, which is the old section of the waterfront.

Soon enough, it was time for checkout (a noon checkout is another nice feature of this particular hotel chain), and the staff was all too happy to let us store our things in the locked luggage room.  Moreover, they were kind enough to allow us back into the apartment building because last night we forgot to take advantage of another major benefit — a free laundry room.

Multiple times during the day we would return to the desk and the attendant would give us a key to let us back into the apartment building to check our laundry.   It dried more slowly than we would have liked, perhaps because the washing machine seemed to have a rather unproductive spin cycle.  Also, we found out that dryers in this part of the world collect extracted water in a special tank which needs to be emptied out like a dehumidifier.  Super interesting stuff.

Because of this, we had to bum around town, spending an hour or so here, then return to the hotel to check the dryer.  It took a little while for it to all work out, but, as stated before, it was free laundry access.  We thank you, Magic Hotel chain of Bergen.

We were not suffering in the meantime, by the way.  No one will complain about wating for laundry if they are passing the time eating ice cream waffle creations.

Eventually, though, the laundry felt dry.  We got the luggage room key and stored the clean clothes with the rest of our stuff, and we were free for the big-ticket item of the day.

We climbed just a smidge up into the hills from the waterfront and boarded the Floibanen, a funicular railway that takes people up Mount Floyen to a little resort area of playgrounds, hiking trails, and fantastic views.

Bergen is a touristy place in many ways, but the Floibanen does not seem to be a tourist-only activity.   We met a local couple in the terminal who advised us that the best views would be from the lowest car, and then they gave us their spaces in that car because they’ve be on it so many times.

This is really a nice place.

The top of Mount Floyen proved quite pleasurable, except that we arrive just a few minutes late for the free canoing on lake Skomakerdiket, but that had more to do with Norwegian laundry appliances than it did with the funicular or Mount Floyen.

 

 

 

The views of the city made up for any disappointment over canoes, and we ended up having plenty of time to walk several trails and then hike back down to the waterfront.  The fairly steep three kilometers down made us appreciate the help we got getting up the mountain.  `

Now quite hungry, we enjoyed a Chinese-food dinner.

Then, in a final stop in at the Magic Hotel, we grabbed our luggage and headed over to the station to catch the night train to Oslo.  We already had tickets reserved, but Jen managed to purchase us a sleeping cabin, which we quickly settled into.  We slept through most of what would be our last major train ride of the trip, and then faced the task of trying to make friends with Oslo after so recently leaving in a huff.

 

 

After yesterday’s series of debacles, I was prepared for catastrophe at every turn today. The Norway leg of the trip was tightly planned out and timing was key (hence the need for the $$$ Uber yesterday), so a missed connection would spell disaster. I was also somewhat dubious about our train ticket reservations, which I had to make by calling the train company in Norway. All I had to show for it was an email with a reservation number — no bar code, no passenger list, no seat assignments.

We were trying to do something called the “Norway in a Nutshell” tour, which involves several different scenic legs to travel between the cities of Oslo and Bergen: the spectacular train ride to the town of Myrdal, a small scenic railroad trip to the village of Flam, a fjord cruise to Gudvagen, a scenic bus ride winding down the mountain to the train station at Voss, and a train the rest of the way to Bergen.

The whole thing takes up pretty much a whole day but gives a great snapshot of the amazing Norway fjord lands. The companies that run the transit time them out so you can smoothly move from one to the next.

So we left the cursed CityBox at 7:45 am and held our breath while boarding the 8:30 train for the first leg of our trip. We immediately encountered a hurdle in that we didn’t have seat assignments and no conductor was in evidence.

We have a first class Eurail pass so we took the last five open seats in first class, figuring we were good — until another passenger arrived to kick one of us out. I sat on a little window seat bench in between the first class carriages and awaited the conductor with a mixture of impatience (because maybe someone was in one of our seats and could be kicked out?) and dread (because maybe we didn’t have real tickets at all and would be kicked off the train at the next stop in the middle of nowhere).

The reality turned out to be in between — we did have tickets, but they were second class for some reason. The kind conductor said that we could keep the four seats that we had, since apparently the people who reserved them didn’t show up. I stayed camped out on my window seat, which was nicer than the second class carriage and actually turned out to be a great location for seeing the gorgeous scenery that we soon began to pass.

The train between Oslo and Myrdal, heading up into the mountains and fjords, is considered to be one of the most scenic train journeys in Europe and it was easy to see why.

Lots of tourists from the rest of the car visited my large window to take photos of the lakes, fjords, mountains, waterfalls, and glaciers. (Eventually two more people got on with first class reservations, so two other members of the family had to join me on the bench.)

Step 1 completed successfully, we waited about 10 minutes on a platform in a gorgeous mountain town then boarded the Flamsbana, a one-hour train ride from Myrdal (elevation 867 meters) to Flam, at sea level. It claims to be the most beautiful, and one of the steepest, train journeys in the world.

Halfway through, the train stops at a gorgeous waterfall so everyone can get out to take photos, and to our surprise there was a mini-show, with a woman dressed in traditional garb dancing from the top of a cliff part way up to musical accompaniment. The ride was one breathtaking vista after another as we wound down alongside glaciers and fjords.

Our luck seemed to be changing — until we tried to book our boat ride and discovered that (a) the next ride was sold out, and (b) the later bus wasn’t running for some reason, so if we waited for the next boat ride we’d be stranded in Gudvagen. This was a real low point. Fortunately, Nadia’s internet skills came in handy again and she managed to find a different cruise that was making the five-hour journey directly to Bergen, our final destination.

We hurriedly booked ourselves tickets for the boat that was leaving in an hour’s time (and reflected that after the previous 24 hours we’d had, maybe getting directly to our destination, rather than having to navigate more buses and trains, was no bad thing.

 

 

 

 

 

And then things truly did turn around.

The boat ride through the fjords was gorgeous and comfortable. We alternated between sitting in our cozy indoor seats (especially when periodic rain started up), playing games and relaxing, and going up on deck to look at the towering cliffs of the fjords, the copious waterfalls, and the little storybook villages that we periodically passed.

 

Our boat arrived at 8:45 pm, which is still broad daylight up here.

It would take a lot for me to feel that this whole leg of the journey, with all the stress and problems, was worth it — but Bergen rose to the challenge. It is hard to overstate how beautiful the town is, particularly when approached by sea in the evening sunlight. It was a Saturday night and the town squares and cobblestone pedestrian lanes were lively with people.

Our rental apartment proved to be literally a few steps from the harbor where the boat docked and just around the corner from the famous waterfront “timber town”, which dates back to the 1700s and 1800s and is a UNESCO world heritage site. (It’s one of the few such sites in the world that hasn’t burned down over time.) Even though it was well after 9 pm by the time we hit the streets, the long day of sun and the energy of the town made us all up for some strolling around as we looked for a place to have dinner.

By the time we’d enjoyed our excellent harborside Italian meal and made our way back to our apartment, it was 11:30 pm, but didn’t feel like it. We can’t wait to see more of Bergen tomorrow.