Oslo - Last day then home

Thursday 7^th June

The day that all holiday makers either dread or welcome; the day to return home has arrived.  After eight weeks of travel I think we are ready to go home.

As our flight to Copenhagen didn’t leave till after 4:00 and our Oslo card is valid to midday we set off to walk to Akershus Castle to arrive at opening time.  The castle dates back to the 13^th century and was extensively remodelled in the first half of the 17^th century and is still in use today for State and Royal functions and the Royal Guard is based here.

Using an excellent audio guide we wandered through the many halls and banquet rooms, private quarters, the dungeon and Royal Mausoleum.  King Haakon VII and his wife, Queen Maud’s tombs are in the crypt under the chapel.  Queen Maud was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria.  The tombs of their son King Olav and his wife Crown Princess Martha are beside them.

The chapel is used for regular services and members of the guard may be married there and their children baptised.  The chapel was altered and modernised in the early 1900s.

 

Throughout the castle are many tapestries and portraits of early rulers of Norway together with a large collection of period furniture, a very interesting visit.

In the castle grounds in one of the old buildings the Norwegian Resistance Museum is housed and has an extensive display of old newspapers, films, models of many military events, weapons, radios and other displays about the events during the Nazi occupation, resistance activity and also the Allied  involvement in the war against Germany.  All the displays also had captions in English and were very informative.

Returning to the hostel to eat lunch and collect our luggage we walked to Central Station to buy our tickets to the airport and found the price had apparently double.  This created some concern as we had only saved the same amount of cash as we paid on the inwards journey.  Making some enquiries we found that a different company runs the more expensive airport express, so we purchased tickets on the normal service and just spent an additional fifteen minutes on the train.

At the airport we had problems checking in at the automatic kiosk so had to stand in line for nearly half an hour to be checked in at the one and only staffed check in counter until another was opened when we beginning to wonder if we would catch our flight.  Also the security staff at the airport is on strike, more like a reduction of services and a go slow.  Only four of the x-ray machines out of ten were in operation so the queues snaked for 100 m or more.  Ann’s hip set of the alarm – again! so she received a very thorough checking over, by a man (at last!) before being able to proceed.  However we finally entered the departure area with an hour to spare and were able to talk our way into the business class lounge – we were flying economy to Copenhagen.

I am writing this in the business class lounge in Copenhagen and we still have about 3hours 45 minutes to departure and then around nine hours wait in Bangkok when we arrive.  Oh, the joys of travelling.