Oslo, Norway 05/08/14

Model of Nansen's ship on the ice; first through the NW Passage. Not a portent of things to come.

Arrived here from Toronto on Sunday evening. The weather had been, for Oslo, unusually hot for the previous couple of weeks, in the 30's, but it broke a couple of days before we arrived and is now a much more bearable mid-20's. This is more than usually pleasant since AC is not usually required here and most homes and hotels forgo the cost of installing it. Our hotel, The Grand, for example does not have it and our first night was very warm as buildings were slowly losing their heat from the previous heat wave. Since then it has been cooler with overcast skies and occasional rain, a foretaste of what's to come on our Arctic sail.

We have been planning and looking forward to this adventure since our friends, Chuck and Eileen told us about it last fall. It will be an adventure for us on a couple of fronts, it is a sailing cruise, albeit a small one, about 190 people, but a form of travel that we have studiously avoided throughout all our travels and we are traveling with Chuck and Eileen instead of our usual 2 person tag team of V and I. We are looking forward to it immensely because it is literally the only way to see the areas that we will be traveling over and through and because we are looking forward to spending time with C&E who are intrepid travelers in their own right.

So, a couple of days to wander through Oslo and get a sense of the city then a charter flight to Svalbard in the high Arctic where we pick up the ship and began our adventure.