Reykjavik

Icelandair's recent success has turned KEF into a mess. I suppose the airport authority simply can't keep pace with the airline's growth spurt.

We spent our short layover in a terminal bursting at the seams with lines of people waiting for their connecting flights. And then spent 30 minutes closed in a warm bus on the tarmac while they sorted out a problem with the plane.

Someday we'll take advantage of a stopover in Iceland and spend a few days, but maybe better to pair that with a Mediterranean vacation, not a Scandinavian one. Not to dismiss either one, but Iceland and Norway are sort of in the same category, and we'd already seen plenty of arctic landscapes.

Helsingborg

We had figured that we would spend the last night of the trip somewhere in southern Sweden, within an hour or two of the Copenhagen airport, but it was the only night of the entire trip that we hadn't booked months in advance. So while we were driving down from Oslo, M found us a place in Helsingborg, which sort of balanced our desire for time on the drive through Sweden with our need to get to the airport the next morning.

Helsingborg turned out to be a good choice, as was our hotel. It was an easy walk through the park, past the old castle tower, and down the steps to the main part of town. The view from the wall above the terrace stairs looked out across town, towards the harbor, and over the narrow northern part of the Øresund to Denmark. It would be hard to overestimate the strategic importance of this high bluff, since virtually any shipping in and out the Baltic goes by here.

The next morning, I walked back down and out to Tropical Beach (really, that's what they call it -- see the last photo), on the north side of the harbor entrance. There's always something special about the final morning of a long trip, knowing that by the end of the day, we'll be back in Seattle.

Mellbystrad

By late afternoon, I had already taken several potential side trips off my list. M had found us a place to stay in Helinsgborg and we still had a long ways to go. But the highway swung close to the coast near Laholm and I decided it was necessary to make a quick detour to the beach.

Mellbystrand was more of the archetype of a beach than the other beaches we had visited this trip. The beach itself was sandy and stretched for miles. There were beach houses in the dunes. There were kids playing ball and folks laying in the sun.

Tjørn Island

Continuing down the coast on our hastily improvised effort to avoid the Interstate (not that they call it that here), we stopped at a grocery store in Henån for lunch makings, then drove south across Orust and Tjörn Islands.

Skulptor i Pilane was another place I discovered completely by accident the night before. I didn't tell M much before we got close, although at some point I was sufficiently lost that I needed help. She noticed the great white head first - it was hard not to. Jaume Plenta has a piece at Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park, too, but this one is much bigger. And the context is a bit different.

We ate our picnic lunch in the car, then headed off across a rocky landscape dotted with some pretty amazing sculptures. The setting is what makes this place really stand apart from many other sculpture parks - there are few, if any buildings in sight, the ocean can be seen many miles away, and the trails are laid out to make the discovery of each new sculpture a surprise.

There were older works on this landscape, too. Off to one side, and carefully identified, there were stone circles and standing stones dating back more than a thousand years. Which just enriches the context for a modern day sculpture park.

Fjällbacka

We would spend about 24 hours in Sweden on this trip - all along the southwest coast as we drove south from Oslo towards Malmo and the Øresund Bridge, which would take us back to Denmark and CPH for our flight home.

I hadn't given this stretch much thought beforehand, so my list only emerged the night before, largely from Google Maps and Google image searches, looking for interesting looking places along the shore. As usual, I had a few more ideas for stops than we had time for, but it still turned what might have been a pretty dull day on the expressway (much of it looked like upstate New York) into something a little more interesting.

We got off the E20 soon after crossing into Sweden and drove rural roads out to Fjällbacka, pictures of which had caught my eye during my reconnaissance. It was a busy summer day in a coastal town (it could have been Maine), but we found a parking space near the base of the Kungsklyften, the trail that winds its way to the top of the cliffs. M was a little put off by the bouldery trail, but we made it through (we found a different route coming back down), and the climbed several flights the stairs to the overlook. It's amazing what you can find on the internet.

Holmenkollen

We could see the ski jump up on the hill from downtown and I guess we realized that meant that it would have a great view back of the city, too. Our CityPasses were good on the T-Bane and we were hoping it might be air conditioned (nope). We took the subway out to the closest stop, then walked the rest of the way up the hill (warm, but not too far).

M convinced me to ride in the simulator (this may have been her scheme all along), which included both a ski jump (over very quickly) and a downhill race (which is more exciting and takes a lot longer). Of course, the downhill was something I could actually relate to, which made it particularly neat for me.

Ski jumps share some basic geometry and characteristics, but this still proved quite the contrast to Lillehammer. Jumps are somewhat limited by the size of the hill on which they're built - if you need more height, you have to raise the in-run higher off the ground. While this jump has a long history, this  structure was completely redone a few years ago.

Besides the simulator, there is a small museum and ticket facility at the base, and then you ride to the top on an inclined lift. As at Lillehammer, there is a great view down the in-run, but unlike at Lillehammer it wasn't set up for summer training jumps. Walking up another level provided a 360° viewing platform - with an outlook that took in all of Oslo.

Oslo Opera House

Oslo's Opera House (Operahuset) isn't just located on the waterfront -- it's really part of the waterfront. The white granite and marble structure slopes up out of the water, the tilted surface eventually becoming the roof. And a public plaza, on which one can zig and zag up to a great view out over Oslo and the harbor.

The building was built about 10 years ago and was designed by Snohetta, which we introduced in an earlier post (Snohetta) from another, very different, one of their buildings.

The atrium was open to the public (and was pleasantly cool on this 88°F afternoon). Everything about the design was cool - even the restrooms and the coatracks. I was a little surprised there weren't even more people out on the edge and in the water (although there were some), as we'd seen big crowds on other parts of the waterfront and I've seen pictures of the opera house covered in crowds, but maybe it was just too hot!

Oslo City Hall

Oslo's City Hall (Rådhus) is a large two-towered, brick building built over many years before and after WWII. It's located just back from the waterfront. It was also a nice break from the heat.

The main portion of the building includes a large central hall and a series of surrounding galleries. There are several very large murals depicting aspects of Norwegian culture and history, particularly in the big hall, and it looked like there's room for them to be added to in the future.

The Rådhus is where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded each December.

Bygdøy

The Bygdøy Peninsula is just west of Oslo and is the site of several popular attractions, mostly based on famous boats -- Viking Ships, Fram, Kon Tiki, and a more generic maritime museum -- but also the large outdoor Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Folkemuseum).

We took the water taxi over from the downtown waterfront and walked with the small tourist crowd through the neighborhood to the museums - two of them, at least.

The Viking Ship Museum is built around three boats, all well preserved, but in various states of restoration, along with a collection of other Viking era artifacts - wagons, figures, tools, and so forth.

These are very old ships - roughly 1000 years - and are a pretty important part of Norwegian and European history. And given that Vikings visited and traded with the Middle East, that they changed the human landscape of northern Europe and influenced the course of Medieval Christianity, and that ships like these reached Newfoundland, I guess they're an important part of world history, too. Of course, they also gave rise to thousands of high school mascots and a fair number of professional sports teams as well.

Given my Scottish-British roots, some of that history must I have influenced me, but ultimately my strongest connection with these ships dates back 50 years, when I visited them as a kid. Not that I remember that any better than when they raided my clan's coastal village in 920 AD.

The Folkemuseum is sort of a Norwegian Sturbridge Village, although it included a much broader scope of historical architecture and culture ... including a gas station and a timeline of 20th century apartment buildings. My favorite feature was a restored (brought in pieces from some other part of the country) stave church. We had seen a few along our route, with Lom (earlier post) perhaps the most impressive, but had missed out on some of the better known examples and had not had a chance to see inside any.