My son Bjorn and I took a very brief introductory trip to Norway (July 14-19, 2024) at the end of a trip to Finland where Bjorn was playing in the Helsinki Cup soccer/football tournament with his club team from Duluth, Minnesota, USA. I would love for the trip to have been longer, but with a family of six (with four kids at home) and with my wife minding the fort back in Minnesota, this was as long as was feasible.
My mother in law, Mardee, who is part of this forum, helped us hugely in organizing this trip, and she in turn received help from many others on this forum. This report is a small return on that help.
OSLO: We arrived in Oslo on July 14 on a flight from Helsinki and took the Flytoget train from the airport to the center–expensive, but very convenient. Mardee had booked us a hotel, the Thon Hotel Opera, which was reportedly near the railway station. It turns out it was quite literally right next to the railway station–couldn’t have been easier–and very quiet and comfortable to boot. It was also directly across from the harbor and very near to the center of town and the many attractions there. We had planned on jumping on a T-bane out to the famous Holmenkollen ski venue to visit the ski museum there and to ride the zipline from the top of the ski jump there, but it was raining in Oslo, as I believe it often does in summer, and the zipline was closed, so we changed plans.
We bought an Oslo Pass at the tourist office at the railway station which ended up paying for all of our transportation and all of our admissions for the rest of the day. After checking into our hotel, and dropping our luggage, we walked along the harbor and caught the Bygdoy ferry at Radhusbrygga using our Oslo Pass. We got off at the main dock for the museums and spent several hours exploring the incredibly interesting Fram Museum of polar exploration. The museum focuses on Norway’s substantial role in exploration of the poles, and especially the roles of explorers Fridjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen.
The highlights of the museum (if I have to pick) are the two legendary ships Fram and Gjoa, which carried the explorers to the poles. After several hours in the museum, my 14-year-old had had enough, though I could have spent several more hours. We retraced our steps on the ferry back to the center where we took the brief walk to the National Museum (covered again by our Oslo Pass). Once again, a prevailing theme, the museum stamina of a 14-year-old was a limiting factor. I shepherded him through the galleries containing the most famous version of Munch’s The Scream and some of his other works, at which point I released him to walk back to our hotel on his own. Oslo felt very safe, and as he had developed considerable confidence navigating Helsinki and Tallinn, Estonia on his own, I felt good about his ability to do this.
I continued exploring the National Museum for a bit more and then a brief visit to the Nobel Peace Center museum before a circuitous walk back to the hotel via the Royal Palace. The evening was taken up with dinner at a sports bar near our hotel where we conversed with a young Somali-Norwegian couple at an adjoining table about the Spain-England European football/soccer championship game that evening. We watched the match in our hotel room, and cheered Spain on to victory.