This travel update is for part one of our one-week stay in Stavanger, Norway. It covers September 4 – 7. “Any text in quotes and Italics has been copied and pasted from some informational website like Wikipedia.”

September 4, 2023 – Monday: Flying To Stavanger

Check out time for our Airbnb in Trondheim was 11AM this morning. At 10:30AM, we left the apartment and walked to the train station. I took a series of pictures of Patti on our walk.

Here she is walking along the street.

And here she’s on the wharf…

…going under the bridge…

…lifting her 51-pound bag up some stairs…

…and, finally, at the train station. We actually took the wrong path so the route was a bit more circuitous than it needed to be, but Patti was up to the challenge.

We caught the 11:11AM train to the airport. Some Americans from Kansas sat down across the aisle from us and we chatted with them during the 45-minute ride. They’re on vacation and are spending one or two days each in some cities in Norway. The last stop before the airport was Hell, so I got a picture of the station sign. We went through there last week on the train to Trondheim. We can now say that we’ve been to Hell and back.

Airport check-in was easy, except that Patti’s checked bag was overweight again so she had to lighten her load by moving some stuff to her carryon bags. Everything was automated like it was in Tromsø, we entered our itinerary number at the kiosk and got our boarding passes and bag tags. We didn’t have to show ID to anyone. We used the automated checked bag check-in and made it through security easily and found a place to sit at the concourse near our gate.

Norwegian Airlines sometimes lets you board through the rear door and we had seats at the back, so it didn’t take long to get to our seats.

Our plane stopped in Bergen. The flight from Trondheim to Bergen took about 45 minutes. We waited on the plane for about half an hour, then we flew on to Stavanger which was a short flight — about 20 minutes.

At the Stavanger airport we collected our checked bags and took the Flybussen (Airport Bus) into the city center, then took the #4 city bus to our stop. We then walked about 100 meters and met our Airbnb host, Emilie, at the apartment building. She gave us the key and explained where the garbage room was and how to put the key back into her mailbox when we leave. We took the elevator up to our apartment. Here’s a picture of the building. Our apartment is on the fifth floor.

This is a modern apartment in a nice building with a parking garage. The living/dining room is roomy.

The bed is comfortable with the typical Norwegian bedding set-up (two down comforters in duvets along with some pillows on top of a fitted sheet).

The bathroom is nice and has a nice washing machine too.

There’s a full kitchen kind of in the hallway between the living room and the front door.

We dropped our bags and walked to the REMA1000 grocery about two blocks away for provisions then came back home and unpacked and settled in.

September 5, 2023 – Tuesday: City Walk

We wanted to walk around town today but first I went for an early jog. There’s a scenic walking path along the water here, I found signs for it and took this picture of the map.

Samsung Health recorded my path in green and it looks like I was able to follow the route pretty well.

It was a nice pathway, I went by beaches…

…marinas…

…and through woods.

Even though the path is on the edge of the city of Stavanger it felt like I was in the country, I even saw a few deer.

Back home I cooled off and got dressed and we headed out to walk around Stavanger. Soon after we started walking, we got lunch at a local restaurant, then continued on. The city has more of these older wooden houses, like Trondheim has. We like the looks of them.

We got to the church of St. Peter, which is being used as the main church of Stavanger while the cathedral is being renovated. It’s a very pretty church with lots of painted wood.

“St. Petri Church is a parish church of the Church of Norway in the large Stavanger Municipality in Rogaland county, Norway. The red, brick church was built in a long church style in 1866 using designs by the architect Fritz von der Lippe. The church seats about 900 people. The church is informally called the Petrikirken.”

Here’s a closeup of the tops of the columns near the ceiling.

The organ in the rear balcony was nice.

Many of the paintings hanging throughout the church were quite unique. They are part of a temporary exhibition of paintings by the artist Håkon Gullvåg, a Norwegian painter. Below is a brief bio of the artist along with pictures of some of the paintings.

After the church, we continued our walk and passed these two trailers where people were advertising the two main political parties here, the Red party and the Blue party. There’s an election for the mayor and city council coming up soon.

We talked to one of the Blue party volunteers, he recommended that we take a trip to the “Flower Island” which is one of the tourist attractions here.

“Flor og Fjære is a collection of man-made tropical gardens on the island of Sør-Hidle outside of Stavanger, Norway. The gardens and restaurant opened to the public in 1995, hosting two tours per day during their season from the beginning of May until the end of September.”

Funny that there are tropical gardens in Norway! We may consider going here this week.

We walked past the harbor where a lot of the tourist stuff is, and more of these old wooden warehouse buildings that have been repurposed.

And there were two big cruise ships moored here. We saw the one on the left, “Anthem of the Seas”, in the Charlotte Amalie harbor when we were in St. Thomas last year.

We talked to a woman in the tourist information building who told us there are cruise ships here every day until the season ends on September 15. I had no idea Stavanger was such a popular cruise port.

Just above the harbor is the area called “Gamle Stavanger” (old Stavanger) where the old wooden houses have been well maintained, the narrow streets are cobblestoned, and there were lots of cruise ship passengers walking around taking pictures. It was a charming place.

We both liked this house, and you can see the cruise ship behind it.

We liked these houses too.

We spent the afternoon walking around the tourist areas of town, going into shops and looking around. We gathered information on how to do the two most popular tourist things here, the fjord boat cruise and the hike to Preikestolen, you’ll see more about these later.

On the way home we saw this little playground outside a grocery store and stopped to enjoy the trampoline. Patti said it was difficult to jump on because of the holes on the mat. Apparently, she likes a mat that has no holes!

You can’t see it in the picture but I did get a little air.

We also saw some interesting wall murals on the way home, like this one.

Around Norway we’ve seen that the manhole covers usually have an interesting decoration on them and I’ve been taking pictures of them, for fun. Here it’s a woman and a boy getting water from a pump.

We enjoyed our walk around the city today. When we got home Patti made our reservations for the fjord boat cruise for Thursday and the hike to Preikestolen on Friday.

September 6, 2023 – Wednesday: Some Logistics And More Walking

The first item on our agenda today was to figure out how we were going to get to Bergen next Monday. We’ve been wanting to take a coastal ferry, but from here we’d have to take a bus for an hour to catch the 7AM ferry on the west coast, which would make for a very early day. There is no direct train, so, we figured we’d probably take the bus. We decided to do a dry run and this morning and took our local #4 bus to the main bus terminal. The guy there told us they don’t sell hardcopy tickets anymore so we’d have to buy the tickets online and he wrote down the website name for me. This evening I went online to buy the bus tickets but the website wouldn’t accept my VISA card, I tried a Mastercard and a debit card, and we also tried Patti’s PNC Bank cards, but none were accepted! Then I did an online chat with someone at the website and they told me they don’t accept VISA or Mastercard from the US, but they do accept American Express! I do have an Amex Blue card that I rarely use but still carry with me so I tried it and it worked. One of the frequently given pieces of advice to Americans traveling abroad is to bring backup credit and debit cards in case one doesn’t work for some reason. I travel with a VISA, a Mastercard, a Discover, an Amex Blue, and also three debit cards. This has been very helpful several times over our past six years of traveling.

After the bus station this morning we went by the train station which was right next door to the bus station and the guy there confirmed that the bus connection is better. The train first goes to Oslo where we would transfer to another train to Bergen and the trip would take 14 hours, compared to 4.5 hours on the bus.

The two stations are across the street from the local “swan lake” which has a fountain and is very pretty.

We walked by the Radisson Blu hotel which is where we’re going to catch the bus for our hike tomorrow. Then we walked through the old downtown with its cobblestone streets and old buildings turned into shops and restaurants.

We walked by this watchtower that’s on a hill, we’ve seen it from several places around town.

I used Google Translate to translate the Blue Plaque on the wall of the tower.

There were canon at the watchtower too!

On the way home we walked through a different neighborhood along a ridge and had a nice view of the harbor, bridge, and waterfront houses.

We walked by a park and I thought the old stone wall looked nice with the green grass and blue sky.

When we got home we relaxed a bit and finalized our plans for the fjord boat cruise tomorrow.