Planning 10 Days in Norway

Research

Well, research is still my superpower, so I confess to reading not one, but two Norway travel guides cover to cover before making any decisions. I repeatedly shoved these books into my 10-year-old’s hands. Fortunately, her class was studying nonfiction reading skills at the time, so she got class time to read them.

Many hours were spent online, googling search terms like “Norway with kids,” “saga sites Norway,” “Norway itinerary 10 days.” I found some useful blogs.

The Fairytale Traveler
Heart My Backpack  
Wandertooth  

At the end of all this I had a list of places we might go. Then I got back to research and spent a couple days working the excellent website for NSB, Norway’s national train system. I used Rome2Rio and Google flights to figure how and when we could get from points various to sundry. I gave the Hurtigruten’s tortuous page a navigational whirl too.

You know the old saying, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach”? Well, my eyes are bigger than either my budget or my calendar. It was time for the painful process of winnowing the options. Besides time and money, the selection criteria included: Viking history with a focus on the sagas; art with a focus on kid-friendly, hands-on activities; and input from the Little.

Oslo

Oslo was a given, since we fly in and out of Gardermoen Airport. Plus, the Museum of Cultural History houses the Oseberg, Gokstad and Tune Viking ships and has a major new Viking exhibit opening days before we arrive. The Munch Museum is located in Oslo, and Munch was one of the first artists I cared about as a kid. I also discovered that Oslo hosts The International Museum of Children’s Art. We are museum types, and Oslo is loaded with good ones.

Lofoten

Blame it on Instagram. I had never heard of the Lofoten Islands before I got on Instagram. But there’s that photo – you know the one, it’s even on the cover of Lonely Planet – and it makes you want to go there. The Lofotens are above the arctic circle, where I’ve never been before. But the biggest draw was the Lofotr Viking Museum, which features the largest Viking-era house ever found. It is also one of the only Viking-era living history museums open year-round.

Alas, all my creativity served only to point out that getting to Lofoten was too much to ask. I could get there, but it would take two solid days of travel and lots of money in additional plane tickets, or we would spend the entire trip getting there and back.

Trondheim

I’ve wanted to go to Trondheim longer than I’ve wanted to go to Norway. Trondheim is on my euphonious bucket list. But when I started reading about it, I realized Trondheim also sounded like my kind of city, known for its college-town vibe and public art. They have an identical copy of the Leif Eiriksson statue that stands on the beach at Golden Gardens. I used to pass it every day on the way to the dog park. Although Trondheim was not built yet at the time of the Icelandic sagas, Snorri Sturlusson spent much of his time in Norway in Trondheim, so he wrote it into the stories. It more accurately features in the Heimskringla. There’s a rock music museum, an interactive kids’ science museum, and a history museum with a significant Viking artifact collection.

I worked out an itinerary that would get us a day and a half in Trondheim. But it required a one-way flight back to Oslo (only about $120, which is a great price but still a chunk out of the budget), and nearly half our time on trains (at least one of them overnight). In the end, I had to let Trondheim go. I thought it would be with a heavy heart, but settling on a calmer schedule was actually a relief. That’s probably proof that I was reaching too much to fit it in.

Lillehammer

Confession: I have no real interest in Lillehammer. But it was my daughter’s only requested destination. Neither of us cares much about Olympics venues, and we’re not planning on skiing during this trip. Those are the two things that draw most people to Lillehammer. What caught her eye was Hunderfossen, a fairy-tale themed amusement park famous for its forty-foot tall troll statue. Folk-Disneyland with a giant troll is pretty much perfect for the two of us. Unfortunately, Hunderfossen is closed in April. Fortunately, according to Fairytale Traveler, trolls are everywhere in Norway, because now we will be on the lookout for all things troll everywhere else on our trip.

Like Seattle and Reykjavik, Lillehammer is a UNESCO City of Literature. Two Nobel Laureates in literature have lived in Lillehammer, and their homes have been turned into museums. This is right up my alley, but in April Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s home is closed and Sigrid Undset’s home is only open on weekends.

This leaves us with a semi-open folk museum that may duplicate what we will have already seen in Oslo’s folk museum, and an art museum that focuses on contemporary Norwegian art. Fortunately, it’s only two hours by train from Oslo and has a cute hostel attached to the train station. It was my daughter’s only requested destination, after all.

Norway in a Nutshell

The body of Norwegian travel literature points to three primary ways to experience the country:

• A summer road trip
• The Hurtigruten
• Norway in a Nutshell

I’m not traveling in summer and don’t like to drive, so the road trip was right out. The Hurtigruten sounds awesome, but it’s pricey and doesn’t leave a lot of time for explorations on land unless you can really take your time and wait for the next boat every time you get off. But Norway in a Nutshell seemed like an obvious fit.

The standard (reversible) itinerary involves taking a train from Oslo to Myrdal, switching to the famous Flåmsbana private rail line for the 20 km stretch from Myrdal to Flåm. There people either stop for the night or continue on with a ferry/fjord cruise. The cruise either goes all the way to Bergen or drops you in the not-quite-town of Gudvangen in Nærøyfjord, where you can visit the Njardheimar, the “Viking Valley.” From there you can take a shuttle back to Flåm or land transport on to Bergen.

Tour companies sell a variety of packages, but the web site is hard to navigate and Heart My Backpack convinced me it’s just as easy and much cheaper to DIY. That’s more my style anyway. The Nutshell is a great way to see almost all the most famous biomes in Norway in a short time and try out multiple transportation modes (Norway is so very proud of its road and train building). Since I can’t get to Lofoten, you can bet I’m going to visit the ancestral county of Egil Skallagrimsson and the very fjord where he stayed with his in-laws while he was irritating King Eirik and Queen Gunnhild.

Bergen

Bergen is possibly the most popular city in Norway for tourists. If I had to choose between them, Trondheim tickles my fancy more. But if you’re doing the Nutshell tour you are going to end up in Bergen, and there is a lot to recommend it. In my case, that would be an art museum spread across four buildings. One of them, KODE 4, is “for children of all ages where visitors are free to explore the world of art through play and experimentation” and has workshops for kids every Saturday. An email was promptly answered assuring me that the workshops are geared to 10-year-olds and English speakers can be accommodated. Therefore, Saturday in Bergen became the anchor in our itinerary planning.

The Plan

We fly out of Seattle on a Sunday night, and arrive in Oslo Monday night.

Tuesday, Day 1: Oslo

Day 2: Oslo

Day 3: Nutshell to Flåm

Day 4: Nutshell to Bergen

Saturday, Day 5: Art workshop in Bergen

Day 6: Bergen

Day 7: Train to Lillehammer

Day 8: Lillehammer

Day 9: Lillehammer/Oslo

Day 10: Oslo

Leave early in the morning on Friday for our epic series of flights home.

Well, that’s the plan, anyway.