Norway and Denmark Memorial Day Vacation

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The kids had also never been on a European overnight ferry, and I wanted to visit Norway to see if I could find the grave stones and birth records of my ancestors. So over Memorial Day weekend, which we stretched to more than a week, we visited Norway and Denmark, passing through the Netherlands and Sweden on the way there and Germany on the way back.

26 May 1995 Friday. After work on Friday we drove to Rotterdam and loaded ourselves and our car on an overnight ferry, which was more like a cruise ship, to Goteborg, Sweden. We had a nice stateroom and a smorgasbord for dinner.

27 May 1995 Saturday. We arrived in Goteborg early in the morning and headed up the coast to Norway. At Moss we caught a ferry across the Oslo Fjord to Horten on the west side. From there we drove south to Tonsberg and the island of Notteroy where my great grandfather was born. Erling, my Norwegian colleague from NATO, had ancestors who were also from Notteroy. He owns land there but is not permitted to build on it, so they camp out. We had rented a hytte (Norwegian for hut) for four nights and had vague directions as to how to get there. We drove back and forth along the road and finally at dusk our hosts waved us down. They took us on a very rough dirt road to their hytte locared on a hill overlooking the island and the Oslo Fjord. They showed us the rooms and how to turn various things on and off, and then wished us well as they returned to Oslo. We had picked up a few groceries along the way so made a simple dinner of soup and sandwiches. We played games before turning in.

28 May 1995 Sunday. That morning we scaled down a cliff next to our hytte as this was the shortest route to a paved road. We walked a couple kilometers to the harbor on the Oslo Fjord, passing farms and animals along the way. At the harbor we watched the swans and ducks swimming in the fjord. We returned to the hytte for lunch.

Afterwards we drove around the island. We stopped at the only church on the island, and looked through the graveyard. We found the marker for my great-great-grandfather, Carl Borgerson, but the birth and marriage records were at the library in Tonsberg.

29 May 1995 Monday. We drove into Tonsberg and I started looking through the records in the library. They wrote differently in the mid 1800’s so it was difficult for me to scan for particular names. Soon the rest of the family was restless, so I gave up and we walked around the town. We had lunch before returning to our hytte where we hiked some more.

30 May 1995 Tuesday. We drove into Oslo and went to the Norsk Folkemuseum to see the various homes and buildings, including a 12th century Stave church. These buildings had been moved there from all over Norway. We watched artisans make various handicrafts, and some dances.

As it was raining we decided to do indoor activities in Oslo, so our next stop was the Viking Ship and Fram Museum. The Fram was the ship that took Amundsen on his North Pole exploration. The Kontiki was Thor Heyerdahl’s raft that he sailed from Peru across the Pacific to prove that pre-Columbian people could have been the ancestors of the Polynesians.

As the rain fell harder we skipped downtown Oslo, as we would be there the next day, and returned to our hytte for our last evening there.

31 May 1995 Wednesday. We packed up our car and returned to Oslo. The weather was much improved so we walked around downtown to see the king’s palace and the City Hall. That afternoon we caught another cruise ship ferry from Oslo to Copenhagen, Denmark. The ship was just as good if not better than the one we sailed from Rotterdam.

1 June 1995 Thursday. We arrived early in the morning in Copenhagen and toured the town; including the Little Mermaid, Tivoli where the kids had a great time on all the rides, and the Stroget walking street where we ate and shopped.

2 June 1995 Friday. We drove west catching the ferry to Nyborg and onto Odense where we stopped to visit the Hans Christian Anderson house and museum. He wrote many children’s fairy tales that the kids knew well so we wanted them to see where he came from. We then drove to Jelling to see the Viking monuments with runes carved in stone, and on to the Legoland Hotel in Billund.

3 June 15 Saturday. We spent the day in Legoland where everything, including Mount Rushmore and pirate ships, were built out of millions of Lego’s which was one of our children’s favorite toys. We bought a few Lego kits and other souvenirs. We left late to Astrup where we spent the evening in this quaint village and stayed the night at a kro, which are quaint Danish inns originally established by royal command. They are a days walk apart so that travelers would have a place to stay on their journey. We appreciated their thoughtfulness. We walked around town and selected a restaurant where some musicians had set up their band to entertain passer byers.

4 June 1995 Sunday. We drove over to the island of Romo, a barrier island in the North Sea, where we walked along the beach.
I had always wanted to visit Romo since moving to Germany as our conversational German text book had a story about visiting Romo. My curiosity was satisfied.

We drove the long drive home through northern Germany. Upon our return we discovered that the farmer who lived on the hill above us had plowed his fields so when it rained the mud from his field flowed down the hill into our yard. Our kind neighbors, Eduard and Julia, had tried to dig it out, but we still had lots of work to do. Fortunately, the mud hadn't gone into our root cellar, as it had done on a previous occasion.

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