Thinking Allowed: Fjord Perfect

After discovering new places we loved in Leiden and Las Palmas, our next stop was already near and dear: southern Norway. Even though we landed at Kjevik close to midnight, Jakob’s parents and sister all greeted us with hugs and baked goods. For the next 20 days or so, we lived the fjord life with lots of family time.

The days were mostly filled with relaxation. Zadie often wandered off picking berries; she ate very few, bestowing most of them on her great-aunt Ingvild. The jellyfish (brennmaneter) were wonderfully rare, so the kids swam every day in the frigid fjord, jumping naked off the dock and fishing vainly for crabs. The weather was a lot cooler, and wearing sweaters felt like a novelty. We made friends with a very cool Iraqi woman and her kids, but otherwise socialized within our gene pool exclusively.

We walked into Grimstad many times, buying Norway’s Biggest Scoops of ice cream at the library and fine-tuning our mystery walk (“The Grim’s Fiddle”). We also took a few day trips with the family: to Arendal to see the tall ships, to Tvedestrand where the kids swam out to inflatables with bluish lips, along Vestrelands Hovedvei, a 19^th-century walking path from Kristiansand to Oslo, hiking around Kalvehageneset, to the old agricultural school, and a boat trip out to Sjaeregarden, the island chain outside Grimstad.

The Netherlands was very flat, making Norway a very different experience: apart from not being able to get anywhere without a car, it really feels like towns tucked into the wilderness. Norway feels a lot more wild, even though we weren’t even in the mountains.

Spending time with family was also a wonderful change. In addition to Jakob’s parents and sister, his niece Thea and nephew Noah were there too. Aurora really enjoyed spending him with her older cousins (and Norwegian second cousins too.) The other kids played endless darts competitions with Ludvik, and sometimes we’d all play Kub. The evenings usually involved a few rounds of vaersagodbligaern (our family card game that was popular like 100 years ago) and Codenames. Many of us are rather sketchy Codenames players, with Tova maybe taking the cake by giving the clue “sprihenac”* in which she anagrammed two different words together, each a separate clue for a separate word on the board.

Tamar’s birthday was another highlight: she got blotekake, brownies, a beautiful pavlova, and a big dock party under a blue sky. Peter made her a botanical challenge, and Jakob (with help from the kids) made an escape room culminating in a treasure hunt row to u-bat-oya.

* Or something like that, who can remember exactly