by Alice McNutt Miller
Day 2-At SeaThis morning, we had brunch in Palo (in the small private dining room) with a group of folks that I had corresponded with before the cruise on a Disney message board. The meal was lovely, and it was great to start things off by meeting some new people!
[Just so you know, I don’t usually take pictures of my food, and I can never remember what I ate, so this won’t be THAT kind of blog. However, when going through the photos, I found that I had, in fact, taken two food pictures. Here is the best one, which I took during our Palo brunch.]
After brunch, we went to a Disney Vacation Club update, another meeting with a broader group of the message board folks, and hung out at the pool. It was all very relaxing. I don’t think we saw the kids all day.
That night was formal night, so we dressed up, went to the Captain’s Welcome Receptions, and then joined our tablemates for dinner in Parrot Cay.
After dinner, we stayed dressed and went to see “Twice Charmed” in the Walt Disney Theatre. This was probably our least favorite show. I’m not sure why, but I don’t think we thought it was very creative.
Day 3-Oslo
We arrived to an overcast and rainy Oslo sometime very early in the morning, and the ship was docked when we got our wakeup call at 7:30. After a quick breakfast at Topsider’s, we were off of the ship by about 8:45, 15 minutes after debarkation was allowed. There is a tourist information desk inside a building right next to the gangway after we got off of the ship, where we bought our Oslo Pass cards. For about $37 per adult, and $16 per kid, the pass got us entrance into nearly every museum in Oslo and a day’s worth of public transportation.
We took a five-minute walk to the ferry pier, and took the public ferry to the Bygdoy peninsula, where most of the museums that we wanted to visit were located. From the first landing point, we had a short walk to our first stop of the day, the Viking Ship Museum. The museum is built around three ancient Viking ships that date back to 800 AD.
We then walked a few blocks to the Norwegian Folk Museum, an open air collection of some 150 buildings dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries. The stave church was especially beautiful.
After a quick snack in a café at the Folk Museum, we caught a public bus to the Fram and Kon-Tiki museums, still located on the Bygdoy peninsula. The Fram Museum showcases the ship that took 19th-century explorers on trips to the South Pole and the Arctic. We really liked the fact that we were able to go inside the ship, and see how the sailors lived.
The Kon-Tiki Museum houses the balsa-wood raft that Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed from Peru to Polynesia.
We then took the ferry back to the center of town, and found a lovely café near the Askerhus that was inside one of the oldest houses in Oslo. From there we took the subway to the Munch Museum. (I must say that we all found the public transportation in Oslo to be very easy to use. As long as you have a general sense of where you are going, and can read street and transportation maps-you know that there are some of you out there for which this is a challenge-it is very easy and inexpensive to get around. )
The Munch museum has a large collection of Edvard Munch’s works-including paintings, prints and photographs. The collection includes one version (the other is in Norway’s National Museum) of Munch’s most famous painting, “The Scream.” “The Scream” and another famous painting, “The Madonna,” were both stolen from the museum in 2004, although they were retrieved several years later. As a result, security is pretty tight here, and all bags had to be checked in lockers.
After visiting the museum, and purchasing a “Scream” refrigerator magnet, we took the subway back to the center, and walked back to the ship. We arrived about 15 minutes prior to the last boarding time. The sail out of Oslo through the fjords was absolutely beautiful!
Tonight was our dinner at Palo. After brunch yesterday, we were really looking forward to it! Someone at Palo must have noted that my birthday fell during the cruise, as I was presented with this, after dessert:
I think the next time we do this sort of trip, we will try some DIY in the ports. Oslo looked easy enough with the Pass and reading about it here makes me think that it was a good choice. We did the Norwegian Adventures excursion that took us to three of the same museums you went to and we paid more than $37/person. Once our kids are just a bit older and more willing to try things on our own, I think that will be the way to go for some ports.
Your family looks beautiful for formal night! The only show we saw was the Villains Tonight as we’d seen the other production shows before and weren’t overly interested in seeing them again. I wonder if part of your blah-ness about Twice Charmed was also because you’d seen Wicked in London just a few days before?
Can’t wait to read more!