Not too little, not too much. Just lagom.

Day Four; 09/01/2019

The next morning was spent doing probably the best thing we did while in Sweden.  Traveling by train and then bus, we ended up about thirty minutes outside the city in the Stockholm Archipelago.  Anyone who knows me is aware that I am unable to ice skate and therefore had been dreading this part of the trip since I had read it on our itinerary.  However, the experience was amazing, partly due to the fact that it was not traditional ice skating.  This was Nordic skating on a frozen lake.  We were equipped with boots, skates, knee pads, ice pics, and poles.  When Nordic ice skating, rather than the boot and skate being connected, the skate attaches onto the boot like when skiing.  Once I got the hang of it and my knowledge of skiing came back to me, I slowly made it across the lake (it was one big lake).  The landscape was beyond gorgeous as we watched both the sun finish rising and then begin to set in a matter of about two hours.  The skating adventure was delightfully interrupted with a fire and biscuits along the coast where were able to speak with Urban Green Spaces who hosted the excursion.  As people who greatly enjoy the outdoors, Peter and Pierre use their love for the Swedish landscape in order to introduce tourists to both Sweden and nature while teaching them about sustainability.

After Nordic skating, we ventured back to Stockholm before our flight to Norway.  In order to get all we could out of Sweden before leaving the country, we decided to grab lunch in the Old Town.  Lunch consisted of Swedish waffles which we had been craving for no particular reason since we had landed in Scandinavia.  They were delicious (too delicious to have snapped a picture before being devoured).  In addition, we quickly picked up a few souvenirs.  As a world traveler, I have always collected postcards since they are easy to pack and a great way to decorate.  With postcards and a poster in my backpack and waffles in my belly, we headed back to the hostel to collect our things and head to the airport.

Saying goodbye to Sweden we flew into Oslo, Norway for a quick layover and then to Bergen, Norway where we then hopped on a three-hour coach ride to our hotel.  Generally, in America, most of the population has some variation of road rage but after our drive to Flåm from Bergen, I came to the conclusion that no such thing exists in rural Norway.  We soon came to find that in order to get anywhere throughout Norway you must travel through extremely long tunnels due to large mountain ranges.  we also found that during our trip most of these tunnels were being renovated, but were being kept open to allow for travel since they were the only viable routes through the mountains.  On route to our lovely log cabin of a hotel, we were stopped due to the construction of the tunnel we had to pass through.  All of a sudden our driver, Tom, exclaimed that we would have to wait outside the tunnel for an hour.  Being that it was about eleven at night and that we had been traveling for the majority of the day, we all assumed that he was joking.  Tom was not joking.  So there we sat as the construction crew continued to work on the tunnel.  Obediently, all cars who drove up to the tunnel queued behind our coach waiting until they could continue on to their destinations.  Never exiting their vehicles or attempting to yell at the construction crew for the delay.  About an hour and a half later the tunnel was reopened and we continued our journey.  Finally, we reached the Flåmsbrygga Hotel and off to bed we went, not knowing how hard we would be pinching ourselves the next morning.