Land of Fjords

On our information sheet that Princess always gives us the night before we get into our next port, they wrote this about Norway – SIZE: 125,020 square miles, slightly larger than New Mexico. Kinda nice to see your state mentioned since most of the time we are forgotten about.

Anyway, today we sailed into the beautiful land of Oslo. Oslo sits on the edge of a fjord and was first inhabited by seafarers since the 8th century. It was actually “founded” until 1048 by Harald Hardrade, the half-brother of St.Olav and is Scandinavia’s oldest capital. It is a beautiful city, very clean and orderly. There is a little graffiti, but not like Amsterdam.

We boarded our bus for the 90 minute ride to the Hadeland Glassworks to watch the master glass blower do his work. The pieces are absolutely stunning, but very expensive – too expensive for me. Plus they are so heavy it would put our luggage weight over-limit. And to ship it would cost around $100. So I was contented to just brose.

Our next stop was the Viking Ships Museum where there are three ships that were found in places called burial mounds. The most intact one was found in 1905, dated to be built in 900 and was the burial ship of a queen. There was a legend of such a ship with a lady buried with it, but no one looked for it until a farmer saw a piece of wood about 1 foot long sticking up out of his field. They found the skeleton of a woman in the burial house on the ship and realized what they had found. It was in great shape because of where it was buried the ground was mostly clay and compacted around the ship and kept it protected from the air. Our next stop will be Copenhagen where we are based for a week then we will be flying home.