This travel update is for part three of our week in Oslo, Norway. It covers July 21 – 22.

July 21, 2023 – Friday (Frigg’s Day): A Day Off

“Frigg is a goddess. In Norse mythology, the source of most surviving information about her, she is associated with marriage, prophecy, clairvoyance and motherhood, and dwells in the wetland halls of Fensalir. Nearly all sources portray her as the wife of the god Odin. The English weekday name Friday (ultimately meaning ‘Frigg’s Day’) bears her name. After Christianization, the mention of Frigg continued to occur in Scandinavian folklore. During modern times, Frigg has appeared in popular culture, has been the subject of art and receives veneration in Germanic Neopaganism.”

We had decided to take the day off today and catch up on some things, but first we went for a jog at the nearby St. Hanshaugen Park. We like to stay in some kind of physical shape so we try to exercise when we can. Here’s Patti jogging in the park and passing a Norwegian woman. Patti is on the right.

There were lots of people in the park walking their dogs, jogging, and just enjoying the sun when it came out. From the top of the small hill in the middle of the park there was a view of a bit of downtown.

Back home we dried off and got some laptop work done then went to an early dinner at a nearby Norwegian restaurant called Restaurant Schrøder that I had found on Google Maps. They advertised that they have traditional Norwegian food. The hostess and waitress there spoke good English so we had no problems getting a table and ordering our food. I got the “Taste Of Norway” meal.

Patti got almost the same thing but instead of a meatball she had a slice of thick bacon.

The cost was 600 NOK (Norwegian Kroner) which is about $60 USD with the current exchange rate. Pricey, but it was a pretty nice restaurant and, again, I want to sample the local food. Both of us enjoyed everything and cleaned our plates.

On the way back home Patti wanted to stop at a liquor store, which is called a Vinmonopolet here. She bought some Irish Cream Liquor because she likes to have a shot of it in every cup of her morning coffee.

Patti wanted to get a picture of us in our waterproof outerwear which we were testing today so she asked a woman on the sidewalk to take our picture. We both have new pants “shells” that are waterproof that we got at REI during their yearly sale. They fit down over our waterproof hiking boots. Patti has a plastic rain coat and I have a waterproof jacket “shell” made by Marmot. So, rain should run down the outsides of our gear and drip off our boots onto the ground, leaving us dry inside. We’d heard there could be a lot of chilly rain in Norway so we prepared for it as best we could. Of course we also have warm underlayers but we didn’t need them today because it wasn’t that cold.

The woman who took our picture turned out to be Ukrainian and we talked to her for a few minutes. Her family is still back in Ukraine but is safe for now.

We got some more catchup work done when we got home and decided to go to the Historical Museum tomorrow.

July 22, 2023 – Saturday: The Historical Museum

We were on the street by 9:45 this morning and walked down to the Historical Museum which is part of the University of Oslo.

It’s a pretty big building, you can see Patti in front of it in this picture.

The first gallery had things from the stone age, when people from northern Europe were migrating up into southern Norway as the glaciers receded following the end of the last ice age around 10,000 BC. Here’s some stone axes from those people.

One gallery had the ceiling from a large stave church that was painted with scenes like we’ve seen in the cathedrals in Italy, Portugal, and Spain. The difference is that this church was made of wood and the scenes are painted onto the wooden walls. It’s from the middle ages, around 1300 AD.

Here’s the painting of the Last Supper that’s on the end wall.

It was quite extraordinary.

But my favorite gallery was this one that had treasures from the Viking era.

Each glass case had a different set of things from the Vikings.

I’ve been reading the book series “The Last Kingdom” by Bernard Cornwell. I’ve finished book 9 of 13. It’s set in England during the late 800s and early 900s AD but has a lot of stuff about the Vikings and Norsemen who are trying to conquer all of the British Isles. This gallery had a lot of stuff that I’ve read about in the books so it was cool to see it in real life.

This case had arm rings, silver coins, and hack silver.

Viking warriors collected and wore arm rings. The more rings they had, the more they were to be respected and feared in battle. When they found other stuff made of silver they usually just hacked it into pieces and used the pieces to pay for stuff. Thus, the term “hack silver” which you can see at the top of this picture.

Vikings usually buried their “hoard”, somewhere on their property, to keep it safe from other Vikings. The hoard could be gold, silver, jewels, and whatever had value. This is the largest Viking gold hoard ever dug up in Norway.

This chain mail would have been very expensive and probably took 6 months to make. It’s dated to the latter half of the 900s and about 25,000 rings survive. This type of armor was reserved for professional warriors and other elites in the Viking age.

As the Vikings were slowly converted from their worship of Odin, Frigg, Thor, etc. to Christianity the tokens they wore around their necks changed from Thors hammer to crosses. In this glass case you can see the Thor hammers at the lower right, and crosses at the top. Thor’s hammer is called Mjølner, in case you’ve forgotten.

Here are some swords, over 3,000 of which have been found in Norway, usually in graves. Swords could vary greatly, some were simple home-forged blades, and some were foreign-made ornate blades with intricate patterns and hilts decorated with precious metals.

And here’s some spearheads. The spear was one of the Viking warriors’ most important weapons. Most were used for stabbing, only the very lightest ones may have been thrown. The length of the shafts was at least 2 meters so they had a greater stabbing range than swords or axes. Spears were the weapon of choice when armies clashed on the battlefield in their great “shield walls”.

They had a replica Viking helmet, shield, and sword for people to try out. I may have been the oldest one to don the helmet today, by a few decades. But, shoot, I couldn’t help myself.

I would have to experiment with how to wear the helmet so as to see well and still be protected from my enemy’s swords and spears. Hopefully I won’t ever have to actually do that in battle.

I had a fun time at the museum, as you can probably tell.

On our walk home from the museum we stopped by the Coop Mega grocery for some provisions.

Future Plans

• July 18 – 26: We are currently staying at an Airbnb in Oslo.
• July 27: We fly Norwegian Airlines from Oslo to Longyearbyen.
• July 27 – August 2: We have an Airbnb reservation in Longyearbyen.
• August 2: We fly SAS Airlines from Longyearbyen to Tromsø.
• August 2 – 10: We have an Airbnb reservation in Tomsø.
• We are thinking that after Tromsø, we will head south down the coast of Norway, making reservations as we travel along.
• October 17 – December 3: No plans yet.
• December 3 – 9: I will be participating in research in Durham, North Carolina, at the Med-El facilities there. Med-El is the company that made my Cochlear Implant. I’ll spend 9am to 4pm for five days being a lab rat. They say they will test various new programming options for my cochlear implant with the goal of improving their systems. It should be fun. I’m looking forward to it.
• December 9: We drive to Bradenton, Florida
• December 9 – 31: We reserved a cabin at Horseshoe Cove RV Park in Bradenton, Florida, where we stayed last year for two months (November and December). We look forward to singing in the Christmas Choir again.

2024

• January through April: We plan to travel through Belize, Costa Rica, and Panama. We don’t have any reservations yet.
• May and June: We’ve reserved a cabin at Horseshoe Cove RV Park in Bradenton, Florida. We’ll spend these two months getting our yearly medical stuff done and visiting with family and friends. May and June are “off-season” in the Sarasota / Bradenton area, and the rate is $56 per night for these 61 days, which is pretty good for a place like this in this location. In season, January through March, the price doubles.
• After June 30, we have no plans, but we are entertaining options about where to travel next summer. Maybe Germany/Austria/Switzerland?