I love traveling by train. You sit back, relax, look out of the window, bug your FB friends with more travel photos, if there is a WiFi, that is.…
I hate traveling by train. You go by all the beautiful places and most of the time they go by, before you even blink. Oh, what a gorgeous waterfall! Oops. Gone!!! What a pretty lake, so peaceful! Ooops, gone again, before you can even focus your eye on it. I’m not even trying to take photos, because every time I get a camera out, the landscape suddenly turns industrial on me and there seems to be nothing but either construction sites, tunnels or endless rows or trees, so close to the train that you cannot even see the forest behind them. As soon as I turn the camera off, suddenly the scenery changes back to gorgeous, and we are suddenly driving by a pretty clearing in the forest, the most picturesque little village, surrounded by mountain ranges and glacier lake. Oops – gone again!!!!
So, we are traveling from Oslo to Geilo today. By train, obviously…
The weather outside is (shockingly!!!) nice and sunny and we are hoping it stays like that for the next few days. We completely ran out of clean clothes, so we have nothing to change into if we get soaked. Apparently there is a lack of laundromats in Sweden and I’m not sure about Norway, but if I had to guess, it’s probably the same deal. We need to survive till Bergen, at least, where we can probably find something, since it has a decent amount of travelers there.
In Geilo we checked into our hotel, Dr Holms, which is an old historical hotel right up about the train station. Geilo is a ski town and it’s one of the few places in the world, where you can hop off the train station, walk literally one hundred stops, hop on the ski lift and go skiing. It’s pretty fantastic. We did a little hike up the mountain, of course Tiny needed to be bribed with a dessert for dinner. Oy, I’m really not liking this trend we’ve created, but he is absolutely hating any kind of hiking or physical labor, and if there is no reward, there is endless stream of whining, crying, tantrums the entire hike. Really not worth it.
The hotel where we are staying is old and pretty big. The lobby is full of stuffed animals and old ski memorabilia. There are two giant moose heads on the wall of the lounge. It has been built up for over 100 hundred years, so now it’s a combination of old parts, mixed in with the new parts, mixed in the semi-new parts, all combined into a “Shining-like slightly haunted creation of endless mazes”. It feels like if you take a long turn, you would end up wandering around for weeks, looking for exit. We went down to check out the spa and tried to get out, but instead we kept running into a bunch of dead ends, locked doors and weird spooky corridors. I started getting a little claustrophobic after a little while, so we had to literally retrace our journey back to our room step by step, which involved getting up few flights of stairs, then going back down few flight of stairs, then walking up and down half flights upstairs up and down, walking down several long hallways, you get the pictures.
We went for dinner at another Norwegian restaurant, mainly to see what kind of other weird stuff we could eat. They, unfortunately, didn’t have any walrus flippers or seal blubber, but they did have a shark, which Bunny wanted to order, but I didn’t let him because of too much mercury, so he ended up ordering reindeer. Of course that set off a whole night of making fun of him eating Rudolph. No Christmas presents for him this year from Santa! Boy, that kid will have some substantial shrink bills in the future…
Tiny ended up ordering snails. What’s up with that kid and the snails? He orders them every time there are on the menu.For some reason, once they arrived, he kept calling them “shrimp”, which made me wonder…
Bobby ordered a trout and a soup. The fish came, then the waiter brought out a tiny cup of something looking like soup. Bobby thought it was way too small of a portion for $11 that they charged for it, but it was kind of a fancy-isn restaurant, so he said, OK and started eating it. It was delicious, he thought. When he was almost done with the soup, the waiter shows up with a big plate of soup, the actual soup that he ordered. Turns out that the “little soup” was the sauce for the fish. Boy, did we have fun that night making fun of Daddy and his “little soup”!
For dessert I ordered an order of cloudberries. Cloudberries only grow in the cold climates and this is my first time trying those. They taste like a slightly more sour version of blackberries, with a specific aftertaste. Actually I have no idea how sour they are, because they were mashed up with sugar and topped with a vanilla ice cream, which Tiny immediately commandeered. They have the seeds the size of the dinosaurs, which Bobby enjoyed, but I not so much. I thought there were more seeds than the actually berries.
World. One place at a time. 