We went to Finse today! I was so excited to get there, but the train wasn’t leaving until 3:59pm and I woke up at 6:30am. We did finally get out of the hotel at 9:30 and went to drop our bags off at the train station, so we wouldn’t have to carry them around all day. We had a few hours to kill so we went to the information center beside the harbor to see where we should go. The final decision was to go to the Bryygan Museum, it told about how the merchants settled, what the merchants’ apprentices did, and what business they did. There was about an hour before we had to get to the train station so we started walking around and stumbled into a ‘museum’ of a castle that was partially destroyed in WWI. One of the ships carrying ammunition caught on fire and blew up the surrounding area. There were some little staircases hidden in the corners of some rooms that were shortcuts. I confused some people when they were going down some stairs because I was at the back, and then at the bottom I was at the front. When we got back to the train station the train was there but we weren’t allowed on it yet, which meant we had a lot of time to get our baggage. The seats on the train were very comfy and could recline. My mum had a nap on the train while I blogged. When we got to Finse, the sight was beautiful, a glacial lake, very few houses, treeless mountains, glaciers and some snow! There are only two places to stay, and we stayed at the mountaineering hut. It was way too fancy to be called just a hut. We had reserved room and board, dinner was at 7:00. After that we sat around one of the common rooms until 10:00. Our room is very small with bunk beds, but I’m fine with that.

Finse and Surroundings
Breakfast and lunch making was at 8:00. The breakfast part of the meal was very good. I had eggs, bread, waffles, juice, and sausages. My favorite part of the meal was the waffle because I put tons of jam on it and ate it with my hands. The lunch part of the meal was making sandwiches for when it was lunch and we were somewhere in the mountains. The bread that was available was the kind that is really puffy and can absorb lots of liquid, so one of my sandwiches was with lots of jam and the other was meat and cheese. The decision for where we were going to walk was up to part of the glacier, commonly referred to as Blue Ice because it’s right at the end of a glacier tongue and it’s still blue! We got to cross a ‘dam’ that held back the water from the lake so it didn’t all flow down the river and create a flood, even though the lake was very shallow. While walking we played leapfrog with two backpackers, either they wanted to stop or we were slow because my mum wanted a picture, and we kept bumping into them all of the way. At the end, we became friends and we have a lot of pictures to send each other when we get home. Their names are Jason and Lucille. One third of the way there Jason and Lucille climbed a big rock that was deposited by a glacier and they invited me up, I couldn’t get up on my own so they helped me. A little past the rock, we had to cross a river by a small flimsy no sided wooden bridge and my mum totally freaked out and took about 30 seconds getting across it😞. When we finally came into view of the glacier, it wasn’t very cool, just your average glacier. What was cool, was that Jason went up the snow by the glacier and slid down it standing up. I slid down a lot too, but not standing up. Lunch was good, and after it I made a cairn, a big pile of rocks. It felt like walking back to the Finsehytta was a lot faster than walking to the glacier, even though we went the same route both ways. Dinner was a lot louder than the night before because a school group had arrived, I guess they do the trip to get out into the mountains for a field trip. After dinner they became VERY rowdy, the worst part of it was when they started running around on the rooftop😳! We were up very late, me on the iPad and my mum was talking to someone.

To Oslo
Breakfast was the same as yesterday. Both parts. We had time to kill after we were ready and had to have our backpacks with us. The Finse station is very small so there was no place to store our bags. We ended up going to the Finse train museum, which had an indoor exhibit of how the railway was created and an outdoor exhibit of some ‘snowblowers’ mounted on the fronts of trains to clear the snow off the tracks in the winter. When the train did come, we were in car six and I thought it would be at the back-ish, and found out that it was second to the front! Our seats were nice and they reclined, even though the people behind us we’re a little upset when I leaned back as far as I could go, a total of ten centimeters. The person my mum was talking to last night knew where our hotel was in Oslo and said it was about a ten minute walk from the station. It took 45 minutes. Our hotel was called Anker Apartments and it turns out that there was an Anker Hostel also, and that one was ten minutes from the station. Ours was in the suburbs. Dinner was at the hotel with food from a grocery store. I had cookies, hot chocolate, and something else I can’t remember, I only care about the dessert😋😛😜😝! After dinner I got ready for bed and blogged.