Oslo
Why Oslo? Well, the last time I went to Oslo was 1990, during my extended working stay on Gothenburg over the summer. My memory of that trip was somewhat fuzzy, to say the least. I have a few photos but fundamentally I was young, and some beer may have been involved. So it felt like time to go again.
Anyway, since 1990 two things have appeared that couldn’t have been done back then – parkrun, and geocaching. And Oslo has both of those in abundance.
The Sketch
I booked it as a package deal though British Airways. I’d already checked the flights with them, and then by comparison it seemed that booking a hotel with them too would be cheaper than booking the same hotel through a separate site. The only downside, as previously noted on the trip to Gibraltar, is that you have to pay the whole thing up front, so once you’ve decided to go, there’s no backing out., which in turn meant needing to be around the airport for
Travelling
I decided to make it the longest possible holiday. I booked the earliest possible flight out of Heathrow, and the latest possible one coming back. That meant my flight out was at 7:50 am. That in turn meant being near the airport between 5 and 5:30, and hence needing to leave home around 3am.
For the trip back my flight left Oslo at 7:30pm, and that put me on the ground around 9pm UK. By the time I’d got to my car and driven home again it was past midnight, with a day of work to be done as soon as I got up again.
No Sleep Till Oslo
I booked a room at the Scandic on St Olavs Plass. Pretty central, and reasonably priced. When I got there it turned out that the room I’d booked was quite small by comparison to recent trips. Small enough that someone of my stature had trouble getting in the gap between the desk and the end of the bed. Let’s just say it was compact. The bathroom was good though, and the bed was comfortable enough, and in any case, I wasn’t planning to do anything in the room but sleep.
A Strange Air
A complicating factor that I could never have planned for was that the Norwegian King, Harald V, sadly passed away overnight on the day I was travelling. I’d wasn’t watching the news in the morning I set off, so the first I knew about it was that all of the advertising boards in the baggage hall at the airport had photos of him. I thought that was weird. Then when I got onto the train into town, all was revealed by the rolling reel of news articles being shown on the TV screens there.
The effect that had on my weekend was limited, really. Nothing closed (at least not for very long). There was a constant crowd of people around the Royal Palace, which was only about 400m from my hotel. That disrupted my first morning of geocaching a little bit, but it’s not like there was nowhere else to go. And there were a few street closures for a while to allow various bits of ceremony to take place, especially on the Monday.
Individual Posts
So here are the individual posts for the trip, ordered from start to finish.
