Sweden and Norway

Stockholm was the final stop on our cruise, so we said goodbye to the Wind Surf and hello to the home of H&M and IKEA.

One of our favorite stops in Stockhom was the Vasa Museum, dedicated to a Swedish warship that was built to win every battle imaginable, except the battle with moderate wind. It sank in the Stockholm harbor, less than a mile from port, because apparently the extra canons and the unreasonably high stern did not help with balance.

Amazingly, the ship was preserved at the bottom of the harbor for about 200 years (the water had the exact right mix of moderate salt and heavy pollution to preserve the wood and keep away shipworms), and it was eventually dredged up and put in a museum for the world to see that bigger isn’t always better.

More importantly, the Vasa Museum is right next to this awesome amusement park, although we were a little skeptical of Swedish engineering at this point and declined to try their roller coasters.

From Sweden we took a train to Norway, land of the trolls (at least according to every gift shop).

We found it more accurately to be the land of disturbing baby statues:

Of course, there is more to Norway than baby-kicking statues. There are also wolf-kicking statues. If this piece had a caption, we assume it’d be “THIS IS OSSLLLOOOOO”.

Escaping the creepy baby realism of the Vigeland park, we took a train up into the fjords. We were dismayed to find that the train also apparently took us into December.

If this is what children need to go back to school in August, we do not want to visit Norway in the winter.

Eager to escape the snow, we rode one of the steepest railways in the world (the Flam Railway) down to sea level.

We spent two nights in Balestrand, a tiny old Viking town on the Sognefjord.

We took a day trip to Fjaerland, a town that is strangely known for having about 20 buildings, half of which are English secondhand book shops.

But we didn’t come here for readin’, we came here to see glaciers!

The largest city in the fjords is Bergen, with its Unesco-listed waterfront of historic houses.

Bergen has a reputation for being very rainy, but living in Seattle has taught us to be skeptical of such reputations. Sure enough, Bergen was beautifully sunny.

We hiked down Mt. Floyen and were grateful for the sunlight as it apparently kept the witches away.

This totem pole was a gift to Bergen from its sister city in the United States: Seattle! Note that at this point it was definitely raining and Phil had to get a new poncho.

Our final stop in Norway was Pulpit Rock, a beautiful and unique rock formation in the southern fjords. From Bergen, we took a bus to a ferry to a bus to a ferry to a bus to reach Stavanger, where we took a ferry to a bus so that we could start the four hour hike.

After climbing up the rocky side of a mountain, we were rewarded with beautiful views. There’s also some nice scenery in the background, too!

Seriously though, it was really dramatic and stunningly beautiful.

Pulpit Rock is a not-at-all terrifying formation jutting out 600 meters above the water. Those definitely aren’t cracks in the rock that you are seeing, and we tried to avoid looking at the tourists casually hanging over the edge.