norway

Just like jumping from state to state in the US, here you jump to a new country!  And in a 1 hour and 45 minute flight, we were here.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple, but still!

Walking to the beautiful Amsterdam train station from our hotel was easy.  The bike racks were so full I don’t know where you’d park your bike!  Or find it!

We had been careful to save enough euros to buy 2 tickets, which according to the front desk would be 4 euros each.  But the machine didn’t take bills, only euro coins.  Huh.  Credit card?  No problem!

The train was smooth and quiet and took us first through suburbs of more apartments, then homes, then businesses.  Two stops and we were at the airport in 17 minutes.

The airport was clean and modern and quite busy.  We found the area for our gate and it was full of green square sitting areas instead of row after row of seats.  It was crowded so you had to wait for a seat, but once you found one it was comfy.  Two areas were like on stairs with many seats and a silver slide down the middle for the kids.  Turns out the reason it was so crowded is that you don’t go wait by your gate.  When they are ready for you, they call your flight number and you go straight to your gate to board.

Like in China, we boarded outside, climbing the stairs onto the plane.  When they announced that we had missed our take-off opportunity there was a collective moan.  Apparently it was busy today and we’d have to wait another 30 minutes.  But soon we were in the air flying due north and it was so quick!

Meanwhile, flying due east was Mike, meeting us in Oslo on a nonstop from Orlando.  His flight was delayed by almost 4 hours and left at 3 a.m.  So on the positive side, it put us landing within 30 minutes of each other.  On the other hand, it meant we would miss our rental car.

Norway is pretty expensive but Mike was able to rent a car just inside the city for much cheaper than at the airport.  The plan was he would get the car then pick us up, which was perfect because he got in at 2 p.m., but now that he was late this didn’t work because his location closed at 5 p.m.  We thought about taking a train and getting the car tomorrow, but that car rental office was also closed all weekend.

So we went to the car rental counter in the airport and now it was 3 times higher and seemed there was confusion with our reservation anyway.  The extremely helpful clerk looked and checked and looked some more and shortly he found a good option for us that had us leaving there with a car for not much more than we had planned.  Ok!

Except…..10 minutes ago, he explained, they got a notice that Visa was having problems.  What!?  Like the Visa credit card company.  Sure enough, Mike’s card wouldn’t work.  Neither would mine.  Nor my debit card.  Between Mike, Katie and me, we had 7 cards…..all Visa.  And no cash.

Lesson One:  Always carry cash.  Lesson Two:  Get a MasterCard

Katie got online and sure enough, Visa was completely down in all of Europe.  I dashed to the money exchange place because online it said ATMs should work.  They said their machines were down for Visa.  She pointed me to the actual ATM.  Meanwhile, we were working on a MasterCard loan option with Mike’s brother.  Good grief!

There was English on the ATM, but when it said How Much, I typed in 500.  No place to put a decimal.  I thought I was saying Give me $500 in krone.  The machine spit out a 500 krone note.  Okkkkkkk.  How much was that?  I had written down that 100 NOK = $12.21……so I had like fifty bucks.  At least we could get McDonald’s in the airport.  Just then Mike came up and tried his card………nothing.

But, the money exchange said they could accept yen!  And US dollars, of course.  At least we could get a train ticket.  And food haha!

So we traded in some yen and dollars and got cash.  An hour later, the rental company said the cards were working about half the time now.  And lucky us, we got our car!  The clerk even threw in free nav, which would be great because I still can’t get my phone to work, Katie still had a Japanese phone situation going, and we didn’t know what Mike’s phone would do.

We cheerfully got in our little car, but the nav was in Norwegian, duh.  I’m sure you can change it but we couldn’t figure out how.  Mike’s phone seemed to be working, so we plotted our course to the AirBnb, 37 minutes away in Oslo.

The drive was beautiful!  There were farms like up north, with sprawling odd-shaped fields on rolling hills and huge red barns.  The clerk at the rental company (who worked last summer at Universal Studios in Orlando!) said that the long days are great but that even in winter with the sun only up about 6 hours, there is so much snow that it looks bright out.

The directions were for me to pick up our keys at Joker grocery store at the cash register.  Turns out there are dozens of Jokers but I was able to confirm with the host that ours is open 24 hours.  The clerk seemed pretty confused by my request and maybe didn’t speak English.  A helpful guy in line looked at my AirBnb reservation, then another store employee came up and there was a drawer full of envelopes and keys, like maybe this is a service they do.  Finally they found  mine and we were off.

The apartment building was close by and we found parking on the street a block away.  The keys in Europe don’t work like ours but after some messing around we got in the building.  We were supposed to go to the second floor.  There were 3 doors and the host’s name wasn’t on any of them.  Then Katie remembered that in Europe the second floor is what we call the third–the first floor is ground (or zero at our hotel).  On the third floor we found his name on the door.  Finally we were here!

The apartment is really cute with pale hard wood floors.  It looks like this apartment is his home sometimes so it feels cozy and lived-in.  It is right across the street from a little meadow or park where people were hanging out having picnics.

Even though it was late, we were eager to explore a little.  It was so light out at 9:30 p.m. we were able to walk around no problem.  There is a trendy area of shops, cafes, and bars near us and many people were enjoying their Friday evening outside.  There was a really big park with people playing frisbee, throwing a football, and kids and dogs running around.  We found a pizza place and sat in an open window right on the street.

We got back late and noticed a sign by our car–maybe we weren’t in the free parking area after all.  We found online that we could park there until 9 a.m. tomorrow, so something to deal with later.  Even as we settled in at midnight, it was still light-ish outside with a pale blue sky.  The sun came blasting through the windows before 5 a.m. this morning–no curtains and no air conditioning, so the cars are rolling by and the birds are chirping and we’ll find out what Norway has in store today!