We left Edinburg, Scotland and just an hour and forty-five minutes later we landed in Copenhagen, Denmark. Actually, the airport is on an island just across a long, narrow bit of water connecting Koge Bay to Niva Bay. We picked up a car at the airport. We spent the night in Copenhagen. The next day, after seeing a bit of Copenhagen, we headed out into the country side of Denmark.

As you have no doubt noticed, we generally prefer the small towns and country to the big cities. We made our way up the coast. We had planned to cross into Sweden at Copenhagen, but discovered a ferry at Helsingor. And there was Sweden, just five kilometers away – about three miles. So, we drove onto the ferry, parked the car, and went to the bow of the ship to watch the trip across Niva Bay to Sweden.

These are the flags of Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Our goal at this point was Norway. But from Denmark, the best way to get to Norway (particularly since we were driving) was across the western edge of Sweden.

We made our way up along an excellent road, four lanes, divided, but with cross roads occasionally. We poked through a couple of small towns before reaching Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, with about half a million people. This is the home of Volvo. We found a nice hotel, and then roamed around the city. Once again, we found the American influence in the area. The restaurant we selected for dinner was decorated with the statue pictured here.

Gothenburg is located on an arm of the North Sea. They claim that the Gulf Stream influences their weather and that it has a mild climate. We had packed long sleeve shirts, sweat shirts and sweaters as well as jackets. That turned out to be a waste of space, as we never needed any of those in all of Scandinavia. Day light extended until around 10 p.m. conducive to strolling through town in the warm evenings.

When we left Gothenburg, we made our way on up to Norway. As I will mention in several of these posts, crossing from one country to another was a non-event. On this day, we didn’t even know exactly when we crossed out of Sweden and into Norway.

Oslo is a very modern city with a population of about 650,000 and consistently ranked as one of the most expensive cities in the world. (We found no reason to contradict that.) It is a major shipping center and considered important in the global economic system. It was impressive and our hotel confirmed it was an expensive city.

Of course we had to journey out of Oslo to find the Viking Ship Museum. They had many artifacts and three complete Viking ships. It was an amazing museum and we spent a good bit of time there.

Norway is famous for its fiords. Most of those are on the western side of Norway, on the North Sea. We had our eyes on Stockholm, just in case they wanted to give me the Nobel Prize for Literature, so we decided not to head west, but rather east, back into Sweden.

Next month, I’ll talk about Sweden where, among other things, we tried out their emergency facilities.

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