Trip through Norway

This post is long in coming, because R and I were traveling around and visiting his family in Norway in late June.  We flew into Oslo and met his parents there.  We spent only a day and half, walking around the city and catching up with friends.  We visited Vigeland's Park, the largest sculpture park in the world made by a single artist.  Babies throwing temper-tantrums and the huge monolith are perhaps the most famous works in the park.

The sculptures chronicle the phases of human life from birth, through raising a family, to old age.  While some of the statues are of single figures, several are made up of intertwined bodies, and the park culminates with a huge 56-foot high monolith made up of such interlaced people.

Next we drove to Trondheim to visit R's sister and her family on their real, honest-to-goodness farm.  I wish above anything else that I had made more photos of it, because the farm and the surrounding countryside were some of the most beautiful landscape I've seen.  Above is a photo of the farm's early 20th century buret, or larder, lifted off the ground on little feet to keep creatures out of the food.  The farm itself is much older, but was victim to a massive fire in the 1930s, after which the buret had to be rebuilt.

We also visited Nidaros Cathedral in the center of the city, which was built over the grave of king Olav Haraldson.  Built between 1070 and 1300, it was, during the Middle Ages, one of the four most popular pilgrimage destinations after Jerusalem, Rome and Spain's Santiago de Compostela

We walked along Trondheim's Nidelva river with those so typical Scandinavian houses painted in yellows, reds and whites.

And walked across the Old Town Bridge, or the Gamle Bybro, the Bridge of Happiness.

Not to mention hiking along the coast-line.

Where everything is so green and lush that plants grow right from the roofs.

Next we drove along the Western coast-line, punctuated by Norway's famous rugged Fjords.

And on to Bergen, built up into the hills.

Where we visited the outdoor market, filled with Norwegian delights.

And at the risk of saturating you with other people's vacation photos, I'd like to mention that by the time we made it to Haugesund, R's hometown, we'd gorged ourselves on Norwegian Waffles...

And shrimp so fresh they had been caught and boiled the very morning we ate them.