Trip of a Lifetime Part 3 - Oslo, Norway (Vol. 2)

So I honestly cannot remember which day this was.  Actually, I think it was Sunday, but I can't remember the date.  Anyway!  My mom had been wanting to go to the Norwegian Folk Museum (or something, can't remember exactly what it's called).  It's on the peninsula called Bygdøy, which you can access by boat, bus or car.  Since we didn't have a car and the idea of sitting on a bus for an extended period of time with Mara didn't sound appealing, and since the boat ride to Bygdøy from the pier only takes about 10 minutes, we opted to go by boat.  We all headed down to the pier, just missing one of the Bygdøy ferries.  While we waited, I took this photo.

It's a ferry boat.  One of many at the pier.

The ferry ride to Bygdøy was, fortunately, short and uneventful.  The Norwegian Folk Museum is a large plot of land (I forgot how many acres, but it's many!) where they brought something like 150 old buildings from around Norway (or maybe just old Oslo, I can't remember, sorry!) and sort of constructed a village.  There were some people in period clothes, doing demonstrations and explaining the history and such.  I didn't take a ton of photos because the weather was pretty sketchy and it rained a fair amount of the time, but here's what I do have.

Corky could not resist getting on this tractor!

This was the Stave church.  Pretty crazy!! 

Mara's favorite thing, aside from the playground, which I

unfortunately don't have any pictures of, was the little house

where they were doing a demonstration of lefse - a traditional

Norwegian bread made from potato.  Here it was pretty thick, but

when my mom and I make it for Christmastime, it's thinner, like a tortilla.

Anyway, Mara loved it and ate two whole pieces (in addition to her lunch! Lol)

Most of the buildings here were from the mid 1800s.  They had both rural buildings and then a mini city.  Mara got a lollipop from an old-fashioned drug store, but she fell asleep before she could finish it, so I did it for her. :) There was a dental museum full of extremely creepy old dental equipment.  It made me very glad for our advancements in technology.  There were some mannequins in the dental museum that Mara did NOT like.  There was a farm with animals which we all enjoyed.  The pigs were really cute, although they smelled horrible.  Mara liked the chickens, much to my dad's dismay (he grew up on a chicken farm with 5,000 chickens and doesn't much care for them anymore unless they're on his plate) and we all enjoyed the fjord horses.

As we returned to the dock to await the ferry back to Oslo, Mara fell asleep.

Just a little funny side story: Mara sleeps deeply and sometimes when she is awakened before she's ready, she can get a little combative.  We had to wake her up to take her out of the stroller in order to get on the ferry and she was livid.  She screeched and kicked and flailed for several seconds until she became fully awake.  Poor kid (and poor mom, who got the brunt of the half-awake aggression).

When we arrived back on the pier in Oslo, the rain started in earnest.  Up to this point it had just been sprinkling a little bit.  We quickly ducked into a French bistro for dinner.

I had a little bit of a hard time choosing something to eat here.  

The food was unfamiliar and nothing really sounded good, so Mara

and I ended up splitting a hamburger, which worked out fine.  

I believe it was the following day that we went on several excursions.  First, in the morning, the sun was shining so we headed down to the pier where there was a playground.  It was supposed to rain later in the day so we decided to take advantage of the sun while we could, and Mara had been bugging us to take her to this park for a day or two.

After this, we went for a walk into the city to see the palace again and the parliament building.  My mom and I had seen them on the day that we walked to the laundromat but Corky hadn't seen them at all.  Since I'd already taken photos of both places, I didn't take any this day, but I did take a picture of Mara being entranced by a handpan player on the streets of Oslo!

The guy was really good, and very friendly. 

We gave him several kroner both this day and

the next day when we saw him again.  Mara liked him.

Since this post has already gotten pretty long and it's already 7:30am, I am going to cut it short and make a Volume 3 post.  I have to go wake up my sleeping kid for preschool and my sleeping husband for work.  (It seems that the dogs and I are the only ones who can get up on time. Lol!)  Stay tuned for Volume 3 of the Norway adventures.

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).

Bolle.

Mara loved this cow at the Ben & Jerry's.

Oslo, Norway Volume 2 coming soon!

Trip of a Lifetime Part 2 - Amsterdam, Netherlands

July 25-27, 2017

On July 25, we drove from Connecticut up to Boston, MA to catch a red-eye flight to Amsterdam.  Mara was not in a very good mood this day, but eventually she fell asleep on the Mass Pike.

Boston or bust!

Mara was in much better spirits by the time we arrived at Boston Logan Int'l Airport.  She had a snack of pretzels while we waited for my parents and sister to show up.

We met our airplane - an Airbus A330.  It was actually very comfortable and Mara loved the fact that there were little TV screens in the back of all the seats.  She watched several episodes of Elena of Avalor, a show which she had never seen.  They also fed us dinner (real food!) and breakfast because it was a red-eye.  It was actually only about 6 hours long and Mara slept for several of those.  Despite sleeping, she woke up groggy and disoriented. 

Before the flight...

And after... not so happy!

I was absolutely exhausted.  As I've mentioned (I think) in previous posts, this pregnancy has been very hard on me.  Sitting in an airplane, however comfy it may have been, for six hours and being up all night was just about more than my body could handle.  We arrived in Amsterdam at about 9:00am which was unfortunate because check-in at the hotel wasn't until 3:00pm!  Some other members of my family (I think it was everyone except my dad and me) went out to explore Amsterdam a little bit while I lay down and slept on the hotel lobby floor.  Not comfortable!  Eventually, the hotel staff found a room for us.  It would turn out to be my parents' hotel room, but they let me and Mara nap in the bed.  Mara slept so hard she actually wet the bed!  I felt bad but my parents weren't mad.  We woke up around 2:30pm and went to get lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe.

Mara insisted on wearing a costume that cousin

Brady had given her.  I believe it's an Alice Through

The Looking Glass costume from a previous Halloween.

Later that evening we went on a canal tour of Amsterdam.  We were are still pretty tired despite several of us having taken naps and we found the boat ride very relaxing.  Mara passed out on my lap and slept for about forty of the sixty minute ride.  I found it hard to keep my eyes open as well.

After the canal tour was over, Corky was going to take Mara back to the hotel and go to bed for the night despite the fact it was only about 6:30pm.  However, upon arriving back at the hotel, Mara seemed to perk up a little bit and wanted to go to dinner with the rest of us.  We went to a pancake place and she wanted a "chocolate pancake."  So she ended up with what was basically a massive crepe with Nutella on it.  She devoured it!

Mara and her giant pancake with Nutella!

The next morning.  Mara had a very hard time waking up.

Poor baby.  Jet lag is no joke and she took it like a champ.

The hotel we stayed at the first time had an AWESOME breakfast buffet.  Mara decided she would only wear that Alice costume again.  It wasn't a battle I wanted to fight so I told her she could wear whatever she wanted.  Here are some pictures of Mara at breakfast.  I'm not sure these were all actually on the same day, but she was wearing the same outfit for both mornings we were there, so here they are.

My cute mom at breakfast.  I believe this was the first day.

My mom and sister went off in search of art museums (not a hard thing to find in Amsterdam) and my dad, Corky, Mara and I headed to Vondelpark - a giant park in the city center.  We found a few playgrounds but this is the only photo I took:

Mara on a huge swing!

On the walk back to the hotel, Mara passed out in the stroller.  She used to sleep in strollers when she was a little baby but hasn't really done so in ages.  It was so cute!  She didn't wake up at all and actually slept for over an hour like this back in the hotel.  It allowed me to get a nap in too, while Corky went out exploring on his own.

My sister decided to take a nap later in the afternoon, so the rest of us went out for a walk.  We walked over to Old Town and actually found the hotel we would be staying at for our next jaunt in Amsterdam (to be covered in a future post).  I was having a lot of trouble with my veins in my legs and groin.  They are varicose and they HURT.  So we took a lot of rests.  One of the stops we made was at a playground, of course!  Mara had a ball.

Family photo.  Yes, I was very tired.

My gorgeous girl.

The area right outside our hotel.

July 28, we flew to Oslo, Norway.  Stay tuned for Part 3!