Southern coast itinerary

I recommend to travel with the weather forecast, check https://www.yr.no/en. Follow-the-sun principle.

Some thoughts:

• Plan enough time for Oslo; do not rent a car before leaving Oslo.
• If you plan to travel by car book winter tires.
• Not at the coast but I found Rjukan very interesting.
• You will find a remarkable restaurant at Lindesnes with the name Under.
• I recommend to contact the Stavanger Museum for finding emigration related information or sights.
• A lot of Europeans - likely also some Norwegians emigrated via Hamburg, Germany. This is where the transatlantic ship lines had their hub to various destinations. Check out Ballinstadt Emigration Museum. Also Bremen in Germany was a known place and hub for emigration.
• The big plus of Stavanger is the "close" Lysefjord.

Thank you! So you think snow could be an issue in April? I read that in the south, it shouldn’t be a problem that time of year. Is it best to stick to the coastal road?

We cannot exclude that there will be snow in April - maybe only for a few days. See statistics in posted link, and we have seen snow here in April which is much more in the south, Denmark in between.

Hard to give a recommendation because I do not know what else you are looking for. What you wrote you will find at several places. The coastal route is liked in summer months and a few larger villages / towns fulfill your requirements, e. g. Sandefjord. So you will not be disappointed.

If you want, I can direct you to a FB group that does Norwegian genealogy. The members were very helpful.

One of my grandfathers immigrated to Minnesota (via Iowa) from Sand, Norway. He left out of Stavanger in 1890. I knew there was a book written about emigration from Sand to the US, so I asked about it on the FB group, and a woman offered to send me a copy. Seven of the pages of the 300+ page book are about my relatives!

Thank you mnannie, that would be helpful! We had hoped to hire a tour guide, a historian of sorts, that could do a private tour for the day. We are curious about the history of some of these southern towns. So far, I've only found tours in Stavenger.

Thank you Mark, we will take precautions for snow and will reference that link. Much appreciated!

I've just googled Kristiansand Tours, and came up with a company, but their parent company is this company- https://www.nord-dmc.com/

Clearly I can't tell you anything at all about them.

I'm sure Stavanger Museum will have a lot of information as there was a very big deal earlier this year (the 200th anniversary of the first recorded Norwegian emigrant voyage to the USA) and a replica vessel (the Restauration) sailed over to the US- she is currently touring the Norwegian coast- https://www.restauration.no/en

All sorts of events happened in Stavanger for her departure.

I'm not sure how much genealogy you are trying to find (or whether you know all the family history), but it seems to be a bit challenging in Norway. I've just been running with a case of a Norwegian emigrant (not my family, just a favour for a descendant who is a member of a Local History Group in the US who were writing an article on the subject). Unlike you, literally all we know is that he was born in Norway (no town known). We also believe he anglicised his surname on arrival in the US which complicated things a bit more. But long story short little was achieved in spite of much effort and time being expended. It seems that all the old Church Books [Registers} are in the State Archives, but only a minority have been digitised.
So what looks like an on line database isn't really.
Whether copy registers exist in Churches I don't know, but it should be possible to determine from the Archives whether the books for Mandal and Lindesnes are there and if they are in the minority which have been digitised. Hopefully (unlike in the UK, where original registers are not normally presented by Archives for researchers) you (or a genealogist) could search the books.
And I wish you better luck than I had.