Norwegian Cruising Adventure - Day 3 in Oslo

We tested negative for our Covid. We will be allowed to board our ship. The adventure continues.

On Friday evening we attended the welcome reception with our fellow Tauck travelers at the Grand Hotel. Half of the group is staying at a nearby hotel. Surprisingly there are only 45 Tauck guests traveling on the ship. The other 100 guests will be primarily French tourists. On the previous three Tauck cruises the entire ship was Tauck. This could be a little different.

The reception and dinner were held in the same room where the Nobel Peace Prize recipients dine after receiving their medals. The plates are embossed with the Nobel Peace Prize logo. Just think, next year the Nobel Peace Prize recipient could sit in the same chair where I sat. Lucky them.

This is the place setting for the Nobel Peace Prize awards dinner. The circle at the top of the plate is the replica of the medal.

On Saturday morning we packed our suitcases and put them in the hall for pick up at 8:30 am. The next time we see our luggage it will be on our ship. We enjoyed the breakfast buffet and once again I had baked beans.

At 10 am we boarded the bus with our tour guide Dale and set out for our days adventures. The first stop was the Fram Museum. This museum chronicles the exploits of Norwegian adventurers that reached both the North and South poles. The specially built ship named Fram (Forward) is on display and can be toured above and below deck. The Norwegians were the first to cross Greenland by sled, they purposely sailed a ship into an Arctic ice pack and drifted from north to south over a three year period. They reached the North Pole in a blimp, they were the first to transit the northwest passage and the same ship that transited the Arctic brought a Norse crew to Antarctica and were the first to reach the South Pole. They beat the British explorer Captain Richard Scott by a few weeks and left him a letter telling him he was too late. Scott and his team perished in a blizzard and never returned to base.

This is the original Norwegian ship Fram. She was key to many polar expeditions.

In 1888 Fridtjof Nansen, together with five companions, became the first to cross Greenland’s inland. They spent six weeks skiing across the ice cap from east to west and had to spend the winter 1888-89 at Godthaab (Nuuk) on the west coast before they could get a ship back to Norway.

We also visited the Kon Tiki museum with a display of the original raft. The Kon-Tiki expedition was a 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have reached Polynesia during pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so.

Our next stop was the amazing sculptures of Vigeland Park. There are over 200 sculptures by Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943) in bronze, granite and cast iron, including The Angry Boy . There is an entire park dedicated to his work. It is said that if was alive today he would be on medication, Gustav created the image of the angry boy by offering candy to a two year old in a Paris train station, Then he took the candy away. All of his statues are nudes so they will stand the test of time and not be dated by the fashion of the times.

That is a very angry boy!

The monolith in the background has 121 individual bodies carved into it. It is impossible to describe the vast amount of artwork on display in this park.

Our final stop for the day was the Holmenkollen Ski Jump, perched on a hilltop overlooking Oslo. It offers a panoramic view of the city and doubles as a concert venue. During Oslo's annual ski festival, held in March, it draws the world's best ski jumpers. In the off season they have a double zip line that provides a dramatic view above the ski jump.

It is finally time to board our ship. Two people in our tour group tested positive for Covid and were not allowed to board. Tomorrow we will wake up in Goteborg, Sweden.