Stockholm, Sweden and travel update

We have arrived in St Petersburg, Russia and have boarded the Viking River Cruise ship Kirov for our 13 day trip to Moscow.  We will be spending the next 4 days in St Petersburg and will have some pictures of Russia as our visit progresses.  After leaving Norway by train we arrived in Stockholm, Sweden for an overnight stay.  We had only a few hours to walk the historical city center but did not have time to spend on a tour.  What we did see was very beautiful, friendly and surprisingly "Italian", but much busier than we saw in Norway.  We are getting used to the "White Night" up in the northern lats.  The sun sets about 10:30 but it stays a bright twilight all night long until the sun raises again at about 4:30.

More on St Petersburg later.  We are having a great time and have had only one rainy period the entire trip.

Trains, Ferries, Fjords and towns

Yesterday we boarded a train and headed over the mountains....

Where there is still lots of snow but the lakes and rivers are just now thawing......

Giving us lots of waterfalls to enjoy along the way.

We arrived at the little village of Flam (pronouced Flom) which is just a little village on the edge of nowhere but is simply beautiful. In Flam, we boarded an Express boat....

and sailed through the Sognefjord which is considered one of the most beautiful fjords in the world.

We stopped for the night in the little village of Balestrand.....

and checked into a little hotel run by a wonderful family who made us feel like old friends during our brief stay.

The hotel was just up the road from a restored Stav church which was the place of worship during medievel times.

The only permanent structures that they knew how to build was a boat, so they built their church as an inverted boat which you can clearly see from the inside.

This morning we boarded another boat and wound our way through the narrow passages of the Hjeltefjorden and the Puddefjorden into Bergen.

Bergen is the second largest city in Norway and once was the capital before it was moved to Oslo.  It is a thriving city of about 250,000 people with lots of tourist and cruise ship traffic. 

As usual we found some of the non-tourist area and streets....

we think are so wonderful and more of what we came here for.

Tomorrow, another train ride back to Oslo then on to Stockholm.

Oslo and Finding Millie's Roots

As many of you know Millie's maternal grandfather, Ole Stavn, immigrated from Norway in 1884 when he was only 3 years old.  Today we rented a car and drove about 2 hours northwest of Oslo to the little village of Fla where Ole was born.  Along the way we were treated to some spectacular scenery with lakes, rivers, farms and mountains all melted together into one amazing vista.

We believe that Ole's father worked a farm in this area and took the name of the farm (Stavn) as his surname....a common practice back then.

And here is Herself back where it all started.  This is the Fla Lutheran church where Ole's parents were wed and Ole was baptized.  Pretty cool!

Back in Oslo, a view of the Royal Palace at the end of Karl Johans gate.  Miles of open sidewalk cafe's, shops and 17th century architecture.

The royal Palace.

A nice place to walk on a spring afternoon - the Royal gardens between the Palace and the Castle.


Tomorrow we head to the Fjords

Hello from Oslo, Norway

We had a very long, but uneventful flight from Seattle to Amsterdam, via Houston.  Spent one night in Amsterdam just to get acclimated and arrived in Oslo this afternoon. No pictures yet but we should have some tomorrow if the sun keeps shining.  We have been enjoying the adventure of figuring out train stations and ordering food from foreign menus and so far we have not gotten lost and we have not starved.....but it is still very early in our trip.  More to follow.......