Scandinavia Trip Part 4 - Lillehammer

In the morning, we left Oslo for Lillehammer, which is at the northern end of Lake Mjosa. When the bus got us to town, we stopped for lunch. This is where I had my third fish soup. It was a little salty and less flavorful than my previous ones. Kathy, Ngoan, and I split a mooseburger to try the taste. Afterwards, we had some time to walk around. Kathy found a Lillehammer coffee mug for her granddaughter. Ngoan and I found a Vietnamese restaurant, but it was closed because it opens only for dinners.

The local tour took us to the ski jump, the site of the 1994 Winter Olympics, to take the chair lift for the view at the top. But we were told we could not because they had only one attendant and there should be one at the bottom and one at the top of the lift. Kopi gave us a choice of walking up the almost 1,000 steps to the top - or not. Joy, an energetic fellow tourist from New York, eagerly accepted the climbing challenge. I looked at Joy and asked a stupid question (a delay tactic while trying to decide whether or not to join her), “You are going up?” She snapped back, “What else do we do?” before going full-speed ahead. I had to make an instant decision to follow suit, and found several others in pursuit of the top view behind me. The steps reminded me very much of Koko Head in Honolulu. By the time I reached 600 steps, several had dropped out. I stopped for a break and convinced Judy, who also had stopped at this point, to continue. Her daughter Natalie, Joy, and another woman were ahead of us. When Judy and I got to about 760 steps, she declared she was done. I declared that was fair. So we took pictures of each other and rested until the three gals who made to the top came back down.

Lillehammer is a small town, but here we stayed at the most luxurious hotel of our trip: Scandic Lillehammer Hotel. Leticia and Alicia joined us for a walk. We stumbled upon a soccer field where we lingered and watched some practices. Afterwards, Kathy, Ngoan, and I went on a little hike and found strange mushrooms on the path. When we got back from the hike, we walked around the perimeter of the hotel to take pictures of its several sculptures.

I felt so spoiled at dinner where the array of food seemed to be endless. Besides the choices of hot food, there were different kinds of cold meat, smoked salmon, and cheese. There was a Norwegian brown cheese called brunost that I think I’d had for the first time in Orlando this past July, but it was called jetost. I wouldn’t have minded staying another night here. The hotel has a very nice sauna/pool area. After dinner, I used the dry sauna and not the wet one because I didn’t bring a towel with me and they didn’t provide towels at the sauna/pool area, which is so strange to me. This was the first time I got to use a sauna on this trip. The Scandinavians don’t seem to be into saunas as the Croatians.