Our trip today
Just as most other moving-days, we did not manage to do much, but we will manage to write a whole page of storyline on the not much we’ve done. The church bells start chiming at 07:00 this lovely Sunday morning. I didn’t know Oslo was so .. Christian. But one nice touch is that it’s not just ringing of the bells, but a relatively hip song they’re playing out there. Our window is open, which helps for oxygen, but it also helps with the noise from the street. I wake up at 07:30 as my alarm goes off, only to promptly fall back asleep until 08:10 and then I get up for-realz.
Breakfast in the hotel is in the basement, it’s quite nice, and my eye is caught by a fancy Nespresso machine. The coffee definitely tastes really good - what was I going on about all these weeks about Nescafe powdered coffee? I apologize. This is the real deal (and in case you were wondering, as soon as I drink a barrista pressed double espresso, that will be the realer deal). We have a light breakfast today, only a few sandwiches, eggs and bacon. I enjoy real Rauch orange juice (!)
We had thought to charge the car so that we don’t have to do that in Kiel. There’s a supercharger 1.3km away from here, conveniently located in a shopping center with an underground parking lot. I find it curious that this location has mostly one-star ratings on Google, and this is because the Norwegians are surly that to charge their car they must pay NOK 40 per hour. OMG how will they ever survive. The words ’entitlement, much’ ring through my head as I proudly park the car in this place. It’s not yet 9am, and we’re looking for a grocery store so that we can buy the requisite feta cheese for our lunch today. Any grocery store will do, really, but many of them are not open on Sunday. We’ll take anything Norway has to offer, except REMA1000, because we boycott that one. We don’t really remember why we boycott it, but we do and that’s all we know.
It turns out, there’s a Joker in Tjuvholmen, so that’s great. It’s great because we get to flick out our cell phones and book us another set of those lovely Bolt/Tier scooters. We scoot over there, we get the cheese and some more tomatoes, and then realize that it’s 09:12 and our boat leaves at 14:00. We definitely have some time on our hands. We kill this time by finding three geocaches scattered across the city: One at Tjuvholmen itself, one at the third dock of the Pipervika and the third one at Nobels Fredssenter. We also try a fourth one at the operahouse, but that one is annoying because we can’t find it. We now hate Opera, with a passion.
At around noon, we take off from the Thon Vika Atrium hotel and make the 350 meter schlepp all the way to the Color Line harbor. There, we are joined by a bunch of other cars, ready to go to Kiel. We listen to music and I make the signature Trunk Salad, with compliments from a few passers-by on the dock who appreciate Die Teslaküche. We gather our belongings into our backpacks, board the boat and hang out in the aft lounge for a while. There’s definitely not too many people on the ship today, most clusters of chairs/tables remain available, all day long.
After passing the lighthouse at the fjord in Oslo, our captain punches the throttle, and our little boat goes 22kts towards Denmark, with its 31.2MW engines. Why doesn’t it have a supercharger?!
Paul takes a stroll around the ship as I finish back-porting our 2013 Roadtrip UK and Ireland into our Hugo site. The first part of the trip still has 4 bars of 4G from Telenor, so I end up pushing and committing to git as well. The pictures will come in a week or so when I’m home, as I have to rummage through an old Google Takeout to retrieve the Google+ photos. Remember Google+? It was similar to the Mobile First era for Google, super very mega important, or at least that’s what Vic told us :-)
We go shopping a little bit. It’s one of those rare moments that I only do window-shopping. The stuff on this boat is really boring, old lady clothes and random chocolates, although I do randomly find NOK 300,- on the ground, which I eagerly exchange for a present (from some poor schmuck somewhere, to me!). In fact as I write this, I’m enjoying the present. Actually we got a bit too peckish having eaten only a salad in the afternoon, so we attack a bag of Kroepoek and a packet of Tuc.
We watch the sunset (which isn’t too stellar, because there’s a bunch of clouds to the West), and see Sweden to the East as the minutes crawl towards 20:00. But, we are swiftly seated and proceed to dine a four course meal, including cured meets, steak, venison, pork and chicken; smoked fishes including salmon, eal, maatjes and fisheggs; an assortment of cheeses from France, Spain and Switzerland with flatbread and grapes. Oh, did I mention we booked the buffet? It was sort of an endless stream of food; we were mighty proud to have finished our four plates like real Dutchmen.
I am GPS tracking our boatride, because Google Maps cannot route me from Oslo to Kiel over water (it’ll cunningly take the ferry from Larvik to Hirtshals, or alternatively the bridge from Malmö to Copenhagen, but seeing as I’ve been so dilligent as to make a map for every day’s driving/boating so far, I decided to go the extra nautical mile and capture our adventure in the Skagerrak and Kattegat. Proudly shown at the top of this post, our lat-long at midnight local time was N 56.934 E 11.746 after having traveled 188.02 nautical miles. The rest of this boatride will have to remain a secret until tomorrow!
We finish our evening messing around on the cell phone, playing a few games, and watching the 8 channels of boring ship’s TV until we settle on the GPS track which updates one pixel per few minutes, an ultra exciting activity. We fall asleep just after midnight, as tomorrow we’ll be expected for breakfast at 7am (!), arriving at Kiel shortly before 10am.
