Cruising the Norwegian Coast to the Arctic
Me in 1970 standing outside the train at a Norwegian train station I first visited Norway in the fall of 1970 when, like many young people of the time, my friend Cecelia and I went to Europe on a three-month post-college-graduation adventure. We visited fourteen countries, sleeping in youth hostels, eating lots of bread and cheese, drinking wine, riding trains or hitchhiking, and marveling at the scenery, the people, and the cultures we experienced. When asked what my favorite part of that trip was, Norway tops the list. Cecelia and I enjoyed Oslo, but the real highlight of our time in Norway was riding the train from Oslo to Bergen and back to Oslo—a sixteen-hour roundtrip. We spent nearly all of those hours (at least as long as daylight lasted) glued to the windows of the train, awed by the magnificent mountains, interlaced with fjords (fingers of water), and by the small villages scattered on mountainsides. ...