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Cruise Ship Mania; 7:30am: I pulled the thick dark curtains shut when I went to bed last night. Now I stumble forth to draw them open upon a new day and… Voila! A massive take-over-the-world-cruise-ship (Independence of the Seas, registered in the Bahamas, capacity 4,370 passengers) has landed and the occupants are disembarking. My imagination is not that active—it’s why I cannot write fiction—but Leviathan was the word that immediately sprung to… Read More
It’s Day 27 of being a Norwegian and I’m almost feeling it. But then I touch on-line reality and remember I’m an American with a President Sleazy-T. I’m sad this evening. It usually happens a little sooner on these epic journeys but being in Norway has kept the inevitable down-day during any given month at bay. It’s not exactly depression or anxiety or physical-offness—more like I need a pajama day with eight… Read More
I’m sorry to say the days of polar bear and walrus photos are forever gone but there are cats on a step and sheep in the field and swans in a pond and fish in the soup if you continue on…best I could do. IIt’s All Happening at the Zoo 9am: The Britannia, a cruise ship holding 3,647 people is parked directly outside my window. Arne had warned me this could happen… Read More
Morning: I took the MS Nordnorge from Trondheim to Bergen; I spent a not very satisfying day in Bergen being a tourist (not a traveler—and there is a big difference in my mind). Now it’s the morning of September 1st and the second phase of this trip begins. In about two hours I will take a taxi to the central bus station and a big fast comfortable bus to Stavanger where I… Read More
It’s the last day of August and I’m in Bergen, Norway (which will return in a later post). For now here are some photos from Trondheim. I stopped over there both as a base from which to go meet the Swedish cousins and also to experience a little of where my South Dakota grandfather, Ole Floren, originated. I spent a couple of days in Trondheim years ago but wasn’t as deeply into… Read More
The excitement surrounding the meeting of the Swedish cousins is based, in no small part, on my mysterious grandmothers, one Norwegian, one more Swedish than we knew. The grandfathers have been more easily knowable. In the case of Grandpa Neset—I lived next door to him as a child and I was able to find my Norwegian Neset cousins fairly easily. Getting to know them over the years has been enormously interesting and… Read More
8/29/Wednesday morning. On the road (sea actually) again. I set the alarm for 5am so I would have more than enough time to putter, shower, last bit of packing (hard work with all of those #$@%^&*#$ souvenirs to squash/push/crush down. I was tired…stayed up a little late watching “Retribution” on Netflix. Then some more chapters of the Dylan bio—with which I’m quite bored, almost two-thirds of the way through the book and… Read More
It’s a foggy Monday morning in a skiing village called Funasdalen in the west central part of Sweden, the region where my maternal grandmother was born and lived her early life before immigrating to South Dakota with her family. But much more about this later this evening when I’m back ‘home’ in Trondheim and have time to process the joy of becoming acquainted with new cousins and visiting meaningful family locations. For… Read More
Crossed the Arctic Circle a couple of hours ago. Southward bound. Another lazy day—should I be doing something? Writing, thinking, planning, making lists, reading, puttering, planking? Not really. Days on ships are time out from real life—adventure on the Linden, sloth on the Finnmarken. I have just spent a couple of hours on ancestry stuff—stimulating hours actually. Day after tomorrow I take the train from Trondheim over into rural reindeer-herding ski-country Sweden… Read More