Tourist day in Oslo, with expert guiding and advice from Cristina and Melissa.
First we went to Frogner Park, the most popular tourist attraction in Norway. It's the equivalent of Central Park for Oslo and contains over 200 statues by Gustav Vigeland. The work began in the 1920s and finished in the 1940s.
A couple of Facebook friends seemed a little shocked so here's a description from Wikipedia: "Most of the statues depict people engaging in various typically human pursuits, such as running, wrestling, dancing, hugging, holding hands and so on. However, Vigeland occasionally included some statues that are more abstract.."
The figures are all naked but mostly they aren't doing, um, naked things. This is a family park with kids crawling all over the more accessible statues.
We enjoyed assigning orienteering-related captions to a few of them. Feel free to play along at home!
"The control description said it would be in the *upper* part of the re-entrant. And the vegetation was thicker than you mapped it. I must have lost 3 minutes there."
"Woot! I punched the finish control first! Hope that F75 racer will be OK."
"Where the he## am I?"
"Congrats on your first win!
"I told you to stop following me!"
"I'm tired of the Adventure Running Kids winning all the O Cup races!"
We spent the afternoon at the fascinating Fram Museum, which contains the amazing old wooden ship "Fram" that Roald Amundsen sailed when he was the first to reach the South Pole, just ahead of the Scott expedition. So cool - we could walk all around the outside and inside of this historic vessel. The museum also covered the Fram's other expeditions and displayed another of Amundsen's ships "Gjoa" that spent two winters in Canada's Gjoa Haven. There were artifacts, photos and information from other early polar explorers and expeditions too. My kind of place!
As difficult as it was to sail to the poles, Amundsen's kayak trip sounded even more nervewracking.
View of Oslo Fjord behind the museum.
Maybe it's just as well that Cristina and Melissa have *not* chosen Norwegian restaurants for dinner so far. We've had terrific pizza and dim sum. 'Bent and I did have some mackerel on bread for breakfast though, with fantastic, strong coffee.
Off to Lillehammer at 6:30 a.m.