Christine Currie

My cousin Jayne’s visiting us for a few days, before she heads up to Bergen for the fjords. This has given us another excuse to eat hotdogs and ice cream and drink beer, and more importantly meant I got to have another swim in the sea.

Today we headed out to Bygdoy on the bus and ended up at Huk, where there’s a lovely big grassy area, a few small sandy beaches, some rocks and a couple of pontoons to swim out to. There’s also a naturist beach on the side of the headland which we took a detour to initially. I didn’t think the path looked quite how I remembered but thought we ought to be able to cut through. Sadly, after wandering around a bit we realised the fence was a bit high, so the biology lesson had to end there.

The water was pretty warm for this time of year, the sun was bright and there were enough interesting things buried in the sand to keep Emma happy for a while. In fact, there was quite a lot of pumice stone about, which came as a surprise to me as I thought it was usually found around volcanoes, but my geology’s pretty basic.

Dave’s brother is staying with us at the moment so we’ve been visiting more of the tourist attractions today. We caught the public ferry out to Langoynes Island today. The ferries around Oslo harbour are a bargain as you get a good look at the archipelago as well as being taken somewhere nice and car free, all for the price of a bus ride.

It was a lovely sunny day so the ferry ride was very pleasant, although the railings on deck weren’t all that child friendly so I spent most of the trip inside with Emma. First impressions of the island were good - lots of grass and some nice long beaches. However, having walked across to the longest beach we spotted the geese - a whole large flock of them. Unfortunately, they seemed to have left droppings all over the beach and the grass making looking after Emma pretty difficult. We managed to clear enough space on the beach to keep her happy for about half an hour and then decamped and got the boat back to the city.

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We’re now about half way through our stay here in Oslo and have finally had some visitors to show it off to. My parents came out here for a week to see us and Oslo. The weather was warm and sunny on 6 of the 7 days that they were here for, which certainly helped them to enjoy themselves (at least that’s what they said!).

The weekend was spent in a “hut” by the sea, near Fredrikstad - our first experience of Norwegian hut culture (see http://www.norgesbooking.no/ - an excellent site to book huts on all over Norway) and one I’m hoping to repeat at some point. It was basic (compost toilet, no running water inside but a tap just over the way) but very comfortable and felt very personal, which I think we all appreciated. Emma’s favourite bit was the baby table that went with the garden furniture as it meant she could stand up for meal times.

Back in Oslo we walked, walked and then went for a run most days, all in the sun. The Norwegians keep telling us it was like this last year in May and then rained for the whole of July. As most of our visitors are coming in July we’re hoping that it isn’t like that this year.

In celebration of the end of the university term and in an attempt to use up some holiday, we spent a few days on the Isle of Wight last week. It was certainly a relaxing break, and a suitable one for a very pregnant woman!

Wednesday was a perfectly sunny day and we had a very scenic crossing from Portsmouth to Fishbourne with Wightlink. We took advantage of the good weather and headed straight for the Needles where we had a nice walk up to Tennyson’s Monument after some sandwiches in the deserted pleasure park (see the photo - I did see rather a lot of Dave’s camera on the first day!). After that, a slow drive along the coast took us to Mottistone, a National Trust property. We just wandered in, not realising that it was still closed for the winter. I’m quite glad I didn’t have to pay the entry fee as there wasn’t much growing yet in the garden!

We had found a reasonable deal on a hotel on the edge of Shanklin, Luccombe Hall. This was a perfectly pleasant hotel but I think they did quite a good job with their website in making it look more attractive than it actually was. Its redeeming feature was the excellent indoor swimming pool, which was nearly always empty whenever we went down to use it.
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