Norway!

Our kids had a two-week Easter vacation, and we spent a little over a week of that with our good friends Morten and Ragnhild and their family in Bergen, Norway. We first met them when they were our neighbors in family-student housing in Berkeley in 2001. Their son Ola is just a few weeks younger than Oliver, and we spent a lot of time together for the year they lived upstairs from us until we moved to Middletown in the summer of 2002. Morten is a physician who received his PhD in public health from Berkeley and Ragnhild is a nurse. Now the boys are 10, and since then we've had Nora, and they've had two more children, Mari (7) and Jakob (4).

We spent the first 4 days at their home in Bergen, with a lovely view of the harbor. 

The kids got along great. Ola got a lot of practice on his English, and Mari and Nora managed to communicate well enough to spend plenty of time jump-roping or on the trampoline ("hoppe").  Jakob decided not to sweat the foreign language thing and just talked to us freely in Norwegian.  We had a lovely hike in the hills above their house, and our kids got to try new kinds of fish.

Morten and Ragnhild treated us to a fabulous day-long fjord tour organized by "Norway in a Nutshell." The trip consisted of a train trip from Bergen to Voss, travel by bus to Gudvagen, where we picked up the ferry for a gorgeous 2 hour tour of the Nærøyfjord.

 The ferry arrived in Flåm, from which we took the famous Flåmsbana, a mountain train, a 20 km train trip going up about 860 meters and through twenty tunnels to Myrdal. From Myrdal, we took the train back to Bergen.

The second half of the week was spent at Morten's mother's house in the country.  Oliver and Nora both caught their first fish. Ola taught Oliver how to cast a lure in the river, while Morten took the girls out on the lake.

Katherine and I hiked all the way to the top of the mountain near the house, and Mike took a dip in the rather icy lake (there was still some snow around the edges!).

On Easter Sunday, after dinner around 9 at night, we rowed out on the fjord and laid a long net and scraped up a huge bucket of large mussels from the rocks. 

The next morning was Oliver's birthday. We rowed back out (everyone had to take turns bailing the boat!) and gathered us the net, which was full of starfish and about 6 cod! 

Oliver got his first lesson in gutting a fish, and then we grilled the fish on an open fire on the beach. Ragnhild met us there and brought a lovely Blotkake (Norwegian cream cake).