What's the first thing you do when you arrive in Norway? Go sailing of course!
Kjersti (my hiking partner in Nepal in 1991) and her husband Per Christian picked me up at the train station, we went straight to the marina where their 35' sailboat, Mar ("Sea" in Portuguese – they spent 2 years in Brazil), was moored. Kjersti made us dinner on the boat, then we unhitched the ropes (that is not nautical terms), motored out of the marina into the bay, raised the sails, and, the Raven II and I were sailing on Oslo Fjorden!
The Raven is a good nautical navigator and enjoyed steering the boat.
We would LOVE to come back one summer and sail the west coast of Norway, like Kjersti and Per Christian have done, twice. There's something about sailing that is addicting... perhaps a bit like endurance riding, I think.
One evening we hiked up a nearby local hill with Hans Jacob and Eli. Hans carried up a watermelon and we sat up top overlooking Oslo and the Oslofjord under gray cloudy skies and a brisk (autumn already?!) wind.
We all had cool watermelon and a toast...
or two.
We visited the the ski jump Holmenkollen - opened in 1892, and site of the 1952 Winter Olympics ski jumping -
which disappeared in the rain clouds.
The Raven made friends with the moose in the ski jump museum.
