Travel adventures

Hello!

I have a non-story sort of post to share with you on this fine summer day. I am very privileged to be able to travel, and I recently returned from an overseas trip with my spouse and daughter. The main part of our holiday was in Norway, which exceeded our expectations. All three of us agreed that we would love to go back and explore more of it.

Since this post is really about showing you a handful of lovely photos—which demonstrate why we found Norway so impressive, given we are all nature lovers—I’ll get to it, shall I?

By the way, Elizabeth, Darcy, and our other beloved characters are never far from my thoughts when I’m away. I was writing during the trip (I especially find the travel component—flights, waiting for them, trains—very productive times), and I imagine them visiting the same places.

We started by spending several days in Bergen, which is charming and colourful and really just such a lovely place to visit. We had two big ‘musts’ during our time there: a fjord tour and taking the funicular up the mountain to do some hiking. The first photo is from our fjord tour, and the second from our hike.

I learned an interesting bit of geologic trivia while I was reading up on Norway before the trip. The mountains were once part of the same range we have have in eastern North America (during the Pangea era). It was amazing to walk around and be so strongly reminded of hiking in Ontario and places such as the Adirondacks. Oddly, we also often felt like we were walking in places used in filming the Lord of the Rings movies, which we are big fans of.Another favourite activity when we travel is to visit museums. (That’s always one of my first searches when I’m dreaming of visiting a place.) While at one of them, I spotted this sign. I’ve cropped it to the important part, and I think why I call it important is self-evident (despite the obvious misspelling of Bennet—haha).

Before we saw it, I had heard that travel to Bergen was really more of a late 1800s phenomenon, although some particular enthusiastic people from England were there by the mid-1800s. One sign I saw mentioned ‘enthusiastic salmon anglers’ being in the first wave of British tourists. Hmm…do we know anyone who particularly enjoyed fishing? Perhaps Mr Gardiner passed on the love of fishing to one of his sons and they made the trip. In the end, I did not let the timing of tourism development dampen my enthusiasm for imagining Elizabeth and Darcy traveling to Bergen.

On Facebook, I mentioned taking the train from Bergen to Oslo. We particularly wanted to do it because it is known to be incredibly scenic, and it was. I did a lot of writing, yet I found plenty of time to appreciate the view and take quite a few photos. We agreed that we’d love to take the time to go to some of the town along the train’s route and pass the days hiking the region. It was absolutely gorgeous!

On to Oslo and the last two photos I’ll share. Oslo is a fantastic city, from what we saw of it in our few days there. I absolutely love how walkable many European cities are (the contrast to Toronto is notable), and we walked a lot, visited museums, sites such as the Akershus Fortress, and spent a morning taking the ferries to the small islands close to the city. One of our first stops was to view the Nobel Peace Centre, where I took the following photo just because.

And to end on a little more green, I took this photo during our walk through the Frognerparken.

That’s it for today!

I’ll be back on 7 August. For now, I’m back to work writing & enjoying time with my girl before she heads back to university. I’d love to know if you have taken or plan to take any summer holidays, close to home or further afield.