Day 16

We got up at 7 and had breakfast in the kitchen. The last jam and grain bread went down with a glass of milk. We took farewell with Astrid and Iselin at home and went over to Elisabeth to say bye. Then we stopped for 5 minutes in Gjerdrum to give a hug to pappa. We were at the airport two hours prior to departure and Jason checked in after a bombardment of questions (as if they didn't spot him out as a terrorist suspect at once). J&A had a coke - correction - pepsi, and we gave each other a big hug before we went back home.

It's been a great trip for all of us!

Day 15

Jason and Anders went to the rabbit island (which Anders had been nagging about all week) with Bjørg, Kjersti, Hanne, and Iselin. We got some sun and roamed around looking at the rabbits before we headed back to town to pack Jasons bags.

Anders cooked up a big dinner with pancakes, stir-fried chicken, fried cat fish, some beef, boiled carrots, garlic bread, rose sauce, and a simple salad. Jason was happy, while Astrid and Iselin claimed that it was too much food before they went out to see other people.

When J&A had done the dishes, they walked to Olav (A&I had already taken a cab). The apartment was very nice, and we met many new and old friends. A&J left at about 1 AM, and walked back home from Trondheimsveien 14 through Sofienbergparken and Grünerløkka to the apartment were we fell asleep. We woke up when the girls came home and started inflating the big mattress in the kitchen. They didn't do a very good job not waking us up... :-)

Day 14

We went to Knut Melby's funeral. It was a very nice funeral with a full church and powerful psalms sung out loud. Many friends and relatives showed up at the coffee following the burial, and all in all we had a good time.

When we came home, we had dinner at TGI Fridays (great chicked breast with Jack Daniels sauce and cokes with free refills), were we also met pappa who had been dancing at Aker Brygge.

Day 13 Ice Ice Baby

We went downtown with Bjørg. We ate Italian icecream (Jason had 6 scoops) and went to a toy store where Anders bought a mustache and a pink hat.

Afterwards, Jason and Anders visited mamma and Sammy in Lørenskog. We had some fun with the mustache and a wig, and ate 4 different grandiosas.

When J&A came back home, we rented the movie Spanglish and ate lots and lots of candy.

Day 12

On tuesday, we met Pål downtown. We were going to see Batman, but we didn't make it to the movie theatre in time - we prioritized hamburgers at Harvey's instead.

We met Astrid later - she'd been working out. We also met Linn. A&L went shopping while J&A went to Bygdøy to meet Bjørg. We watched the sunset at the Bygdøy peninsula before we came back to the apartment and practised some Salsa. Then, we went to SES, a salsa club downtown, to excercise our recently aquired skills... Bjørg spent the night on the famous inflatable mattress.

Day 11 blueberries and horses

Went to Bjørg to pick blueberries. Kjersti came along, and so did Gera, Bjørg's dog. Maria, Magnar and Marianne's daughter, joined us too. Anders and Bjørg rode to the forest. Astrid took Anders' horse back while Jason rode with Bjørg.

Before we went horseback riding, Bjørg's sister Kari-Anne made dinner. When we came back, Jason and Anders roasted barbeque chicken, sausages, and pork tenderloins (?).

After we had eaten, Steinar, B's father, played some guitar. We also listened a great deal to Øystein Sunde.

Day 10

Anders cleaned the floors, Astrid tidied up, Bent watched the others being too busy for a Sunday morning after a night out. We all had a big breakfast with coffee at home.

Later, we went to Aker Brygge, a pier with a lot of restaurants. It was sunny, and since Astrid had all our money, we had to start begging for ice cream. "Penger til is" is the proper thing to say when you need icecream but don't have any cash. After some cold scoops, we had lunch at TGI Friday's with free refills (that's seldom in Norway - and Europe in general).

At dinner time, we had pizza and pasta at Arte Pazza, the italian place we've mentioned earlier. We dropped of Jason at home before we took Linn home. Fortunately, Anders forgot were she lived and took her to Olav's home instead. He had just finished it (his home), so he invited us to a house warming party (see day 15). In the end, we took Iselin home, and returned to Griffenfeldtsgate 17 C where Jason was browsing the Internet for music...

Day 9 part 2 Cocos Bananas

Party day.

A&A picked up Iselin and arrived just in time for the party - Jason had already started welcoming guests: Jason, Pål, Heidi, Kristian, Iselin, Anders, Astrid, Erik, Hilde, Thomas, Thomas, Øystein, Ada, Linn, Elisabeth, Dag Ove, Bent Jørgen, Bjørg, and Kjersti were there - if anyone feel like they should have been mentioned, then add a comment :-)

The party was nice from the beginning, but the noise level increased significantly and culminated in citation from an erotic short story (by a masked person claiming not to be the owner of the book), and Australian shanty, a Monty Python song, another crazy up-side-down-song, some poems, and general background noise.

We kicked ourselves out before anyone else did (the neighbours were probably eager to do it) and went to the night club Tiger Tiger and the piano bar Sir Winston's. Some time in the morning, Jason and Anders walked home and met Iselin, Astrid, and Bent Jørgen there. They were busy talking on the phone and inflating a giant air mattress...

Back in Oslo

We got up at 6 am to look for crawfish in the lake Lyseren which sourrounds Pål's cabin. We found one crawfish and one fish. Then we went back to bed again (that is, A stayed up and read comics).

Back in Oslo, we stewed away all the dirty laundry from our trip in A&A's bedroom. Jason went to Arte Pazza, a place that serves great Italian food at Sankt Hanshaugen with Elisabeth. A&A went to a memorial service in the home of her now widowed grandmother Berta.

Day 8 Going back?

We went by a small town close to the small town Hirtshals, but they didn't have any food there, so we went back. After breakfast, we took the boat back to Norway. At the pier, we received the sad news that Astrid's grandfather Knut had passed away the previous night. We went to Horten on the west side of the Oslo fjord, and took a ferry to Moss on the east side of the Oslo fjord. Then we followed a small road to Pål's family's cabin/hut/lodge/summer house. We had a little chat and went to bed.

Day 7 Amsterdam

We got up, asked the owner of the crazy party campgrounds what we owed her, and she said: "Nothing!" So we left with a smile on our faces...

We drove through Rotterdam (big port!), took a quick stop in Den Haag, and continued to Amsterdam. Jason took a walk in the area close to the central station while A&A bicycled to the Van Gogh museum. The car alarm went off - it might have been jammed by some static, but it was OK and we passed the dikes and drove for 12 hours straight through Germany to Denmark, where we arrived at about 4:30 AM and set up the tent. We slept like logs for a few hours...

where we've been

Denmark, Germany (our fave), Luxembourg, France, Lux again, Belgium (boooooo from Anders & Jason but not Astrid) where we got lost and stuck and found and lost again, and recovered on Zeeland where we got lost again but that is in Holland

Short version of the lost "stranded on a desert island" post

WE LOST THIS POST because the innernet (ref homer simpson) connection was lost. We'll write (a lot) more later!

Day 6 BeNeLux

Went to a boulangerie in the city of Luxembourg, which happened to be a lot smaller than Anders thought. Being a banking capital where most banks are foreign-owned and with extensive foreign dealings, where more than 30% of the country's labor force is cross-border workers, one would have thought that the city should be bigger than it was... French was the native tounge, but they understood english at McDonald's. After Luxembourg, we aimed for Belgium. However, we took a wrong turn and ended up in France, in the little town in the picture. We returned to Luxembourg and bought the cheapes gas on our trip, before we finally found Belgium and entered Brussels an hour or so later.

We had a hard time navigating in Brussels. We tried to aim for NATO, but we kept ending up on the wrong side of town. Then we tried to find the European parliament, but believe it or not, we passed it several times before we finally realized that it consisted of a number of completely anonymous regular-looking office buildings downtown. We thought we'd found something when we followed a big blank monument, but this was Mini Europe - supposedly a replica of Europe...? But we just took a picture of the thing and had a meal (not a pleasant experience for Jason, who had something that - for real - smelt and tested like cow droppings).

We continued into the Netherlands, ended up at Zeeland or some other island in the west were we were kicked out from one campground before we got a free stay at a party camping area...

Day 5 part 2 Breaking the Language Barrier

We left Germany through the Mosel valley, passing the city of Trier and entering Luxembourg. The country is the size of a county, and we actually crossed the border between Germany and Luxembourg several times in one evening, going to the northern part of the country (about 20 miles north of the southern part). We came to a halt at a campground were the primary language seemed to be Dutch, but they handled English very well, too. We grabbed the bikes and went to the town centre to find some grub. At the gas station, they spoke German and a little English, but we managed to follow their instructions and found a chinese restaurant called Lune D'Or (moon of gold).

The restaurant owner was a very nice lady who spoke German and French, but no English at all! We went through the menu, Christianity (!), and other things (sometimes I don't think anyone knew what we were actually talking about) in all the languages we possessed (French, German, Norwegian, and English) and in the end we became very happy to meet her... We got apetizers and an aperetif on the house, two gifts, and many good laughs. The food was excellent - we had chicken and duck, coconut icecream (in a coconut), fried apple on fire, and great Riesling wine from the area.

I believe the name of the city was Esch. Go there and meet the nice little lady!

Day 5 Rhein Riesling Rüdesheim

The campgrounds were right next to the river, but we didn't know until the morning. After all, we had driven up and down winding roads in the middle of the vineyards of green grapes, and we thought we had ended up somewhere up in the hills between Loreley and Rüdesheim.

We bought a bottle of local wine which was delicious, and shared it before we went to bed. Brian, a friendly guy from Korea, and his wife and kid lived in the tent next to us. After a close encounter between Anders' bike and a too low rail road bridge, we mounted his bike on the back of the car and visited Kloster Eberbach, one of many local wineries with an excellent reputation.

After visiting the city Rüdesheim, which appeared to be a real touris magnet (and trap), we took the scenic route up the sourrounding mountains, and the views were breathtaking. This area is well worth a visit. Bring bikes, sample wine, and relax in the calm atmosphere of the beautiful Rhein valley.

We decided not to stay, however, but to continue to Luxembourg, Brussels, and Amsterdam...

Day 4 - Passing Koblenz

Small cities, pictoresque roads, arrived in and left from Koblenz, stopped in a camping area surrounded by vineyards.


River boats on the Rhein a mile south of Koblenz

Day 3 - Denmark and Hamburg

We left Hirtshals as soon as we had figured out how to use the showers with the special shower coins. About an hour later, we had breakfast (or lunch) in Aalborg, an industrial city on the Fyn peninsula, which most people think of when they hear talk about Denmark (although the country consists of more than 100 small and bigger islands, while Copenhagen is on an island close to sweden). We watched an old couple watching us while we ate bread with cheese and danish sausage on a bench on a lawn between some condomeniums.

After our quick meal, we only had one more stop in Denmark to fill gaz before we crossed the German border. The autobahn meant "no more speed limits", but this didn't matter much to us since our average speed was 130 km/h - which is the maximum speed limit in Denmark. It did mean, however, that from now on, we were parked in the right lane while BMWs, Merchedeses and Audis swooshed by in the fast lane.

We made a stop in Hamburg for dinner, were we got to try out our bikes on foreign soil for the first time. Unfortunately, we were too late for the german sausages, so we ate at an Italian pizza place. Afterwards, we drove over to the Reperbahn district, were Beatles worked hard in their early years. Now, the place is a porn strip with nothing much to it. Been there, done that!

For Joel Q: Thanks for commenting on our blog, Joey! You wanted some information on Hamburg, so here we go: Hamburg is a rather quiet city which has a history as a member of the Hanseatic league. So, many of the old buildings have the characteristic tall pointy roofs. The city is placed along the banks of the river Elbe, and Hamburg has an impressive port, especially when you pass it at night time, the lights is a nice show. There are some museums around town, but we did not have time to visit any of them. Downtown, a nice lake seems to have been dug out, which you can see on the picture above. We did not find it too easy to figure out where to eat, but then again, we didn't check this out before we arrived. It's fairly easy to drive around town, and it's also a great city for bicycling, or just for walking, for that matter: Not a lot of hills, but not flat either. The city is rather close to Lübeck, which we also can recommend visiting. Normally, at least in the afternoon, a square in the shopping area downtown is reserved for barbeque, were one can buy a range of würsts - sausages - or just look and smell around. Unfortunately, we arrived just when they were closing, and on top of that, most of them had moved temporarily to a fair which was just over. Bad luck. Reperbahn is a strip dotted with strip joints, bars, erotic cinemas, and hotels with rooms charged by the hour. That area was probably more active a few decades ago, but the police HQ is right next to it, so I guess something is still going on there...

After Hamburg, we drove past Bremen and bought an extremely detailed map of Germany, a book in the size of a car seat. We found a camping area next to the highway (replacing last nights continous wave noise with continous tire noise) were we were taken care of by people speaking more or less, and mostly less, english. The bartender from Prague was particularily nice. The next morning, Jason did a bad job not teaching the dogs to beg...

When I woke up this morning...

We checked the weather forecast for Norway, Denmark, and Germ-any on weather.com this morning and guess what - we found the perfect name for this weblog! WET TRIP: It's raining this morning, it'll rain this afternoon, it's gonna rain in Denmark all the way to Germany, were it will - yes, you've guessed it - rain.

One of us is happy about this fact.

To give you a taste of what we taste, we'll attempt to make a post here as often as possible, that is, when we find an Internet café. We'll even try to post some pictures.

Enough promises. If you want, it should be possible to comment on each entry we put in here. Feel free to find out how.


Anders, Astrid, and Jason

Day 2

Jason woke up from his fold-up bed and had breakfast with A&A at home. We had already packed our bags, so we loaded the car, assembled the bike racks on the roof, and locked on the bikes. There was a drizzle of rain, so we remembered to bring our coats. We also checked out the weather forecast, which was rain every day straight for 10 days in Norway, Denmark, and Germany! So, we named this blog wettrip on that day.

We started off around noon, and drove south along highway E18 on the west side of the Oslo fjord. First stop was in Tønsberg, the Oldest city of Norway. This is one of the few places Jason has video footage from. The most interesting part of the visit was maybe that we learned that Danish pilgrims went by this city on their way to Israel. Did they hold their maps up-side-down?

We continued to Stavern, a vacation city mainly consisting of a small harbour dotted with restaurants and wooden houses. Astrid's cousin Ingunn and her husband Dag (they married a week after we met them) met us at a superb seafood restaurant were they served shrimp, soups, and a fish and shrimp platter for us. Everything was great, especially their bread. After splitting the bill and actually buying some Euros from Ingunn and Dag, we drove on to Langesund, were our boat to Denmark left from.

The boat was not big, but it had room for an all-you-can eat buffet restaurant, an arcade, a disco, a lounge, a little tax-free shop, a mini-mart, and a few other things. It was OK for the 5-hour ride to Hirtshals in Denmark. Jason had the buffet, but wasn't all too excited. Anders had Astrid's chicken wings.

We arrived in Hirtshals a little after 1 AM, and went straight to the campgrounds to set up our tent for the first time and get some sleep. The city is very small, so it was not hard to find the place. The tent was easy to set up, and we fell asleep to the constant noise of waves braking at the North shore of Denmark.

Day 1

Jason left Nashville, Tennessee on Thursday and arrived at Oslo Airport Gardermoen at 10 am on Friday. Anders and Astrid had to wait for about 45 minutes while Jason lounged in the luggage area...

Pappa met us outside of the airport with A&A's car, which we swapped with his because it gave us more leg room for our big trip.

Afterwards, we met Magnar at his job. He entered the scene in his golf-cart looking Solaris all-terrain 6-wheel vehicle. It was really fast, and he took us up a close-to-90-degree hill, went back again, and backed up the same hill! Then Anders had his turn driving; up the hill, down the hill, and up again... Jason bailed out so Astrid could get a ride. We also went to pick up a car with Magnar, and Anders traded Listerine for snus.

Then we went to Astrid's mother's house for the trips first but not last brunch. We had polar bread, which was pretty good, cheese, nectarines, grapes, ham, and some milk to flush it all down with. Astrid's sisters Tone and Jorunn were there - Jorunn left for Hawaii to study a couple of days later.

We arrived at A&A's apartment in Oslo and unloaded the trunk. Thomas came by for a lovely dinner which Astrid cooked for us. She wouldn't let us near the kitchen, where she cooked up some great chicken and pork chops.

After dinner, we took a walk down by the river Akerselva, mainly to inflate the tires of Astrid and Jorunn's bikes, but also to look around. Thomas hired and brought a city bike back to the condo. The city bike is a service provided by the city of Oslo were you get a four-speed bike for free, but it must be returned to a special bike rack within 3 hours.

When we came home, we ran into Knut Peder Dullum, a nice neighbour who was having a moving-out party. We joined them for a drink and went home to get some sleep.

That was the first long day of many on this trip...