This blog actually has nothing to do with Fords or hotdogs for the record.

Like normal, my posts are a little screwed up and not proof read. This one is going to cover time before and after Svalbard, but not Svalbard.

I lucked out on my long flight from Denver to Heathrow because I had an entire row of seats to myself. While on the flight I realized that I haven’t traveled in awhile because I hadn’t seen most of the movies under new releases. I had an uneventful layover in Heathrow where I did meet someone from Denver at the pub.

Oslo harbor

Downtown Oslo

When I arrived in Oslo I checked into my hotel and then and went wandering around town and it started to get dark around 11pm. The next day I left the hotel and went and did some tourist sights around town until I met my parents at the train station. We then did some more around Oslo and then took the train back to the airport to Svalbard. During this time period is was hot, heat wave, walk around town without a shirt, close the castle early hot. It turns out that we ended up in Oslo during the warmest time of the year.

Sad bike 😦

You read about Oslo and Norway being expensive and they really are. A 500ml soda/bottle of water costs $3.50-$5, breakfast $15+, a beer $9-$25, a gyro $11, a 20 minute train ride to the airport $30, a 10 minute ferry ride $5, entrances to museums $10-$20, a yoghurt in the grocery store $3, a candy bar in the grocery store $3, a ferry in the fjord region $30-$40. It all is pretty crazy and if you dwell on the fact that each sip of your soda costs 24 cents it would drive you crazy. Norway passed a law years ago that allows people to hike, camp, fish, and pick berries and mushrooms anywhere in the country without paying a fee. That means you can’t really trespass and you can camp anywhere.

More sad bikes

We the got back from Svalbard and took the airport train, a 5 hour train with great fjord views, an hour train with great views to Flam. A village at the edge of a huge Fjord. We spent the night there and grabbed the 6am ferry to Balestrand. When we checked in we were told the ferry didn’t exist, but then someone said it did. It turns out we were the only passengers and normally there aren’t any passengers. It was a pretty sweet 2 hour ride. We then hopped on another ferry to Mundal.

1100 meters in Norway’s mountains

Flam harbor

The fjord near Flam

On the ferry, our private boat..

From the train

We then rented bikes, rode 8k to the trail head, and hiked 3k of vert to the top of a mountain over looking the largest glacier in mainland Europe and the fjord. My parents were pretty beat afterwards. Today I rode a bike around and had a laid back day. The weather has been pretty temperamental the past couple days, but it didn’t really rain for more than an hour or two at a time.

Hmmm

The glacier looks so small in he his picture

It even shifts!,,,

Mundal church

Cheapest thing in the grocery store, $3