I took a little vacation.

That’s kind of a big deal. I don’t take vacations. It’s a running gag among my European co-workers that I”m the classic American. I’ve never taken a vacation of longer than five days that didn’t involve visiting family or some major household project.

So I went to Norway from October 1-13.

And it looked a little something like this.

I landed in Oslo, and meandered my way down to Drøbak, where this historic episode happened:

I took a picture with the star of that particular show:

Then it was back to Oslo, for a flight to Trondheim, where I rented a car and started driving.

Now, I said earlier that I’d never taken a vacation that didn’t involve family, and I guess I still haven’t. I drove about an hour southeast of Trondheim to the little village of Græsli. Population about fifty – and I’m related to about twenty of them.

The Ned River in Græsli. We’ll come back to this.

My third cousin – more below – took me on a little sightseeing trip, thirty or so miles east to the Swedish border:

Just across the border in Sweden. I actually crossed the border a few times – they’re not really patrolling it out here. Because, who’s going to cross?

That’s right – reindeer. And fishermen.

I met the grandchildren and great-and-great-great-grandchildren of my great-grandfather’s little brother, the only one of four siblings that stayed in Norway.

My Great-Great-Uncle Bersven, 2nd from left in the first row. I met some of the guys who are little boys – Bersven’s grandsons – in this photo..

My visit was apparently an excuse for about thirty people from all over central Norway to get together for an evening at the village community center, where everyone brought all the photos, letters and other family memorabilia they could find.

That’s my great-great-grandfather, Ole Bernson, and his wife Karin. His father, by the way, was Bernt Oleson. .

Turns out my great-grandfather’s little sister was something of a mystery;

That would have been Friday evening, October 6 – before the events in Israel, so as luck would have it the subject of the Middle East never came up, for those who are curious. . We had plenty of other stuff to talk about.

The next day, it was off to follow my fourth-cousin to her family’s place, about four hours south.

I didn’t take many pictures of this leg of the trip – because my hands pretty much needed to be pried off the steering wheel. . I’ve driven on ice – lots and lots of it – and I’ve driven in the mountains. In the summer. Twice.

I’ve never driven on twisty, turny Norwegian roads through a mountain pass after an unexpected snowstorm, though. They don’t build shoulders on roads over there – the edge of the road, in some cases, was a forty-foodt drop into a mountain lake.. So I kept my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel.

Eventually, though, we got to Røros…

That’ Røros cathedral in the background. There was a big wedding going on, and a lot of the people in this photo were on their way to or from that.

After that, I drove down to the coast at Āndalsnes, where I jumped off on two days of driving up the Atlantic Coast Highway – a trip that had me wondering “is there such a thing as too miuch beauty? Is it possible for natural beauty to bludgeon you over the head so hard you become desensitized to it?

Åndalsnes, from across the Eisfjord. If Hallmark shoots a “film” in Norway where the plucky young superwoman takes a break from her high-pressure job running an Oslo ad agency, it’s probably Āndalsnes where she finds love running a bookstore with a rugged but sensitive fisherman.

I lost count of the number and name of the fjords that prompted me to stop, snap a photo, and think “this one makes the last four or five I saw look like wet garbage”.

Depending on the map, the Allantic Ocean Highway fronts the North Sea or the Arctic Ocean – both of them synonyms for stark dangerous beauty:

I could have probably driven from Āndalsnes to Trondheim in a day, but there was just too much to see and do – so I stopped for an evening in Kristiansund…

Kristiansund – Christian’s Sound – from the, er, sund. .

…and then to Trondheim the next day.

Trondheim. This is the part everyone knows – the Nedelva (the same river we saw above up in Græsli) along Kjøpmansvei. .

Trondheim reminds me of Duluth. It’s a port city, that got its start exporting minerals, and fy da, the. hills have got to make ice storms really. miserable. . .

And then it was back to Oslo.

The Oslo waterfront, from Akershus, looking toward Aker Brygge. . .

I spent some time doing one of my favorite things in the world – wandering around a strange city with no particular aim in mind. But I did do a little sightseeing.

I went to Akershus, the ceremonial seat of roal power, and hit the Hjemfrontmuseet (“Home Front Museum”, commemorating life, resistance and yes, collaboration in Norway during the war:

“Milorg” guerillas coming literally and figuratively in from the cold at the end of the war . . .

And the Forsvaretsmuseet, the National Defense Museum…:

A part of a diorama of the Norwegian Navy in 1909. Which wasn’t, unfortunately, much different than a diorama of the Norwegian Navy in 1940. . .

Disconnecting from daily life wasn’t easy for me. I’m not sure I quite got it down. I may need more practice.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, October 18th, 2023 at 11:00 am and is filed under mitch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.