A couple months ago, Diane and I had started planning our trip to Barcelona, and I had a bunch of travel sites open. While I was doing that, I re-discovered http://www.skyscanner.net/, which has improved a great deal since I last used it. One cool thing it can do is you don't have to search for the from or to dates -- you can ask it to look for cheap flights departing from city X over the next month, or in March or whatever. So when I found this feature, I tried it out, and promptly found a €16 deal for two seats to Oslo and back with Ryanair. Wow! Of course, after all the booking fees, that ballooned up to ... €36 for the two round trip tickets. Oh well, I'll take that! So I took the day off work on Friday and Diane and I wandered over to the airport for our Friday afternoon flight. The flight, in Ryanair style, landed in an out-of-the-way airport called Torp about an hour and a half or so from Oslo. From there, we caught a bus to Oslo.

When we were looking for accommodation, we quickly found out that Oslo is one of the world's most expensive cities in the world. Hotels were easily running into the €175-€200/night range, and we weren't exactly thrilled at the idea of spending that much. Eventually, we found a listing for the MS Innvik, which is a ship that's been converted to a theater and bed and breakfast. The boat is moored right in the city center across from the Oslo Opera House, which turned out to be a great location. So we spent the weekend in Norway on a boat!

Saturday was bright and beautiful weather-wise. We took a bit of a walk around the harbour and eventually made our way to the tourist information center. The lady there informed us that we should take advantage of the good weather since it had been cloudy and raining for the last 3 weeks! Guess we lucked out on the weather thing! We picked up Oslo passes at the tourist center which turned out to be a pretty good deal. The pass got us free use of the city's trams, subways, and buses as well as free entry into a couple dozen museums/other attractions.

It being beautiful out though, we decided to not activate our passes (which were good for 24 hours) until later on and instead walked over to the Vigeland Scuplture park. The park is filled with 212 statues originally carved by Gustav Vigeland (although the statues were made by other people based on the sculptures that Vigeland had made). It's a pretty impressive area. Some of the sculpture were pretty amazing, although I do totally remember being impressed by the brick mosaic patio around this fountain (which actually wasn't turned on for the winter).

Next up, we wandered around the Vigeland museum which had a lot of the original sculptures that the statues in the park were made from. Following that, we headed to what is essentially museum central in Oslo. There we first went into the Oslo Folk Museum at the recommendation of the tourist information lady. The museum was a huge area and kind of resembled a Norwegian version of fort edmonton park. They had a bunch of old buildings from various eras, and it was pretty cool wandering around looking at all the buildings on stilts.

It was starting to get a little late so we wandered on to the Viking museum without completely exploring the folk museum. The Viking museum is pretty small, so it was pretty quick to walk through and admire the three big viking boats they had on display.

Next up, we walked over to a small area where there are three separate museums. It was after 3:00 when we got over there and we discovered that the Kon-Tiki museum had already closed, and both the Fram museum and the Norwegian Maritime museum closed at 4:00. So we had some work to do!

The Fram museum was pretty cool -- the museum itself was a giant A-frame building which houses the entire ship that made several polar expeditions -- to both poles. Not only that, you can go up and actually walk through the boat's interior, much of which is still intact. A pretty nice experience!

The Norwegian Maritime museum didn't have a huge amount of interesting things for me, but it was good to walk around it. Definitely good to leave to the end of the day where we could hurry through and then leave. The sun was setting as we left the museum so we stayed by the coast there to take some photos -- some of which I think turned out pretty well. Not too sure when I'll get those photos up, but hopefully not too long.

Having done a lot of walking and a lot of museuming, we returned to the city center to find something to eat. One thing we didn't really find on the trip was any sort of traditional Norwegian food. The places we were at seemed to be populated with Italian and Indian and other food, but we didn't really see anything traditional :/ Oh wells. So we stopped in at an Italian place which wasn't too bad. After having a nice dinner we headed back to our boat to enjoy the evening atmosphere therein.

The boat's common room was the only place where we could get internet, which was a good thing since there was lots of activity in the common room. There was a bar (although the beer they were serving wasn't amazing), and music and just some general fun times. Some dancing even broke out later on in the evening. But we had had a long day so we turned in early.

The next day we were determined to use the remaining time on our Oslo passes, so we first went to visit Akershush fortress, which we didn't realize didn't open until the afternoon on Sundays. Whoops. The day was cloudy and rainy, but we weren't gonna let that stop us. We walked around the outside of the fortress a bit before heading off to the Nobel Institute, which is based in Oslo. They had some exhibits there, but it actually wasn't all that interesting, and was pretty pricey at that! Good thing it was free with our Oslo pass!

From there we caught the underground to the Eastern part of town to check out the natural history museum. That museum is actually several buildings spread across a pretty wide area, and there was a lot to see. So we wandered through the rained on plants for awhile before finding the geological building and then the zoological building. They sure had a lot of stuff to look at! Partway through my feet were sure tired of all the walking!!!

We had a couple hours to spare before our bus back to Torp airport, so we stopped in at another Italian place ... and this turned out to be a really good choice. I had a dish called "Turkish Risotto" which was absolutely delicious. Mmmm.

We picked up our luggage and spent a rather uneventful trip back to Dublin via bus and plane. So it was a pretty good trip! Next up, we're headed to Barcelona over Christmas, which is pretty exciting!

Morgan