A good night's sleep was followed by a good morning's breakfast and a good day's sightseeing and a good evening's conviviality.
We spent the morning at the Holmenkollen Tower ski jump facility on a hill above Oslo. It was rainy and foggy, but the view was still superb across the city and the fjord. It's been rebuilt since I was last here, but you still have to be crazy to do that - it looks ridiculously dangerous, if only for the fact that the landing area between stands is only 25.2m. Must look amazing from the stands, you would spend the whole time wondering when a misaimed jump was going to land on the old bloke alongside you.
After lunching at an old fashioned Norwegian - I want to say 'lodge' here, and I am not sure of the correct term - we headed into the city to look at the Royal Palace and the old Akershus Fortress, which I still rate as one of my favourite ancient military sites to wander round. There is something about it that seems more real than other places I've been - it might be that it is clearly a working defensive structure with no real aesthetic allowances that makes it feel that way. It is not that it is ugly, far from it, more that it is functional first in a way that leaves little to the imagination.
After dinner there was the obligatory spin in the boat. Espen hopped in in his shorts and t-shirt saying that there is a Norwegian truism that "there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing", and proceeded to pull out a full-body drysuit of some impressive looking nature. I was glad I'd gone to the trouble of grabbing a jacket. Marie and Aidan did some tubing as we ripped around some islands at a gentle 25 knots (apparently the boat does 60 knots, and Espen has taken it to Denmark a couple of times). Aidan had a ball, and Lauren thought it was hilarious and giggled herself silly through the whole thing.
Lauren and Aidan have been looking forward to seeing Marie again for the whole trip, and she has been very good with their continuous demands for her attention. She speaks excellent English, and understands more again, and her occasional return to her native Norwegian to convey something she can't quite say in English is of real interest to Lauren in particular. Marie and Lauren have been playing a game which largely consists of going "1-2-3-jump" and Lauren jumping up to be caught. How Marie has carried her around for so much of the day is a mystery to me, and she is going to have some serious upper body strength by the time we leave if she keeps that up!
Tomorrow, weather permitting, we plan to head up to the mountains for a few days. Sounds terribly, I know. Not sure what Internet access will be like, I am assuming not good, so it could be a few days before I get to update this - but hopefully there will be some good stories to tell and great pics to share.
Location:Uh, Norway.
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