Haunted: Trip of a Lifetime Part 3 - Oslo, Norway (Vol. 1)

In order to keep this post from becoming mega long, I've divided the Oslo section into two separate posts. All told, we were in Oslo for 6 days (including the day we arrived). Also, please note that these pictures may not be exactly in the right order. By this time in the trip, the days were starting to blur together and now, several weeks later, I can barely remember when we did what. But the general timeline is correct. :)

July 28-August 2, 2017

By the time we arrived in Norway, jet lag had worn off for the most part. Still, traveling through so many time zones is hard on a person, especially when that person is only two years old! Mara was an absolute trooper though. The first night we were in Oslo, my mom, Corky, Mara and I found ourselves on our own because my sister realized she had left her purse at the Oslo airport. So she and my dad hopped on a train and headed back out there to look for it. (They did eventually find it, but not for several days.)

Corky, Mara, my mom and I all headed out and walked to the Akershus Fortress which was like a three minute walk from our hotel. On the way there, we saw a HUGE cruise ship (no, not the Norwegian Pearl this time, lol! See Seattle trip post June 2017 for that reference). It was a Princess Cruise Line ship and Corky could not stop marveling over the sheer size of the thing. I forget sometimes that he hasn't seen cruise ships up close.

Check out the ray of sunlight shining right on Mara!

I thought it was particularly appropriate given that

her middle name is Soleil which means "sun" in French!

The outside of the Akershus Fortress.

After we left the fortress, we went in search of dinner. We ended up in the shopping district of Oslo and found a restaurant called Eger. Mara was starting to crash and burn at this point, but she held it together fairly well. She ended up with grilled chicken and french fries for dinner, but actually preferred my mom's spaghetti carbonara!

I'm going to take this moment to say that food wasn't a huge challenge on this trip in the sense that my eating disorder voice was not loud. When I'm pregnant, that voice tends to kind of fade a little bit. I do consider myself recovered, but that voice never entirely goes away. However, I did struggle a little bit with the fact that my appetite is just wonky this pregnancy. Thank goodness my morning sickness (aka all-day sickness) has faded considerably and now I only get random nausea spikes. I am just utterly turned off by a lot of foods though, so it makes eating tough in general, especially when every meal is at a restaurant as happens on vacation. So I got very familiar with caesar salads on this trip.

Of all the hotels we stayed in during our trip, this one was my favorite. It helped that we stayed here longer than anywhere else. This actually allowed me to unpack the suitcase! But the biggest reason I liked it best was because the room was not tiny and cramped. Europe is not known for big hotel rooms, which is fine, but when you're trying to fit an extra mattress in there for a two year old, it makes things even more cozy. Anyway, the hotel in Oslo had a couch/bed thing set up for Mara upon our arrival, which was awesome because everywhere else we went we had to bug them (sometimes more than once) to bring up a cot. The bed/couch was on kind of a wooden platform, which Mara fell off of several times. She didn't, however, fall out of bed at all.

Picnic time with Elsa and Baby Owl

(whom Mara calls "Baby Owie")

The following are several random, stand-alone photos that don't have any real backstory to them, so I'm just going to post them along with captions by way of explanations.

Mara loved looking at the artwork through the

window overlooking the lobby while we waited

for the elevator. She said the top picture was people

doing ballet and the bottom one is a birthday cake! So cute.

The breakfast restaurant in the hotel had these water features

which Mara found very fascinating. She referred to it as the

"restaurant with the water" and still talks about it all this time later.

There was a bar/grill on the rooftop (kind of strange in

a place with a climate like Norway but.. who am I to judge!)

that had a very nice view of the city. We went up here several

times just to chill out on the chairs and enjoy the view.

Nice Oslo clouds. :)

My mom and I ventured out to do laundry one day while everyone else stayed back at the hotel. Having been gone for so long, we were running out of clean clothes - especially me since only like 5 things fit me now that I'm pregnant! So we walked about half an hour to this place called Cafe Laundro Mat. The play on words there is that "mat" means "food" in Norwegian, so it's a laundromat/cafe combo. Also, it was kind of like a library.

My mom took this picture of a sign

that was hanging in the cafe. Pretty cool.

These signs on the bathroom doors cracked me up!

While we waited for the clothes to dry (which they never fully did and we ended up laying them out on every available surface in our hotel rooms for the next 12 hours), we went for a walk. We walked through a park and went into a grocery store. I didn't take any pictures except for this one, for some reason!

After we packed up our (still quite wet) clothes into our backpacks, we walked back to the hotel. We ended up taking a different route that brought us right by the palace and the parliament building.

The parliament building, Oslo.

It was a LONG walk.

And again, the following are some random, stand-alone photos with captions.

The opera house from across the water.

The tram near the hotel.

One evening, Corky, Mara, my dad and I all went down to the Oslo train station to go to the visitor's center and look at the information there to choose what we wanted to do for the next several days. While there, we got dinner at this little cafe/store thing. Mara and I shared a piece of focaccia pizza. For dessert, she had a donut and I had a "bolle" (like a bun).