Here are the 24

It turns out that all 24 of my Norway observations are incredibly profound (no one should be shocked by that), so we're going to have a lightning round with all 24. Feel free to ignore. These are in the order in which I scribbled them down, not the order of importance.

1. The train from the Oslo airport to the Oslo central train station, which was right next to my hotel, travels at about a hundred miles per hour.

2. The blindfold/eye shade thingy that I brought along saved my life. I probably got twenty more hours of sleep with that thing than I would have otherwise had.

3. Yes, it was expensive. I'm generally opposed to bottled water as a waste of natural resources and money, but when you're stuck in an airport or on a plane or a train, it's sometimes necessary. I paid about $4 per bottle for water or soda. At one point, I saw a sale where I could get two bottles of Pepsi Max for $2.30 each. I grabbed them.

4. For the Norwegians, it's all about the ocean and the fish. That's the source of everything for them. (And, in recent years, the oil.)

5. Just as in Helsinki and Amsterdam, everyone spoke English, even way up north in Tromsø.

6. Those people must love hot dogs. Every convenience store and gas station had hot dogs for sale. You don't find that in Switzerland. (I never bought one; I didn't travel to Norway to eat hot dogs.) They all seemed to be wrapped in bacon or some bacon-like substance.

7. I saw more 7-11 stores in six days in Norway that I've seen in sixteen years in Minnesota. (Minnesota doesn't have 7-11.) They were everywhere.

8. A crowd of several thousand people was gathered in a giant outdoor theater in Oslo to cheer for Holland in the soccer World Cup. I guess the Europeans all support each other.

9. A couple of times, I was high enough in the mountains to touch snow.

10. I took a bus down the steepest road in Norway. The grade was about 20%.

11. I decided that heaven is eating a seafood dinner in a restaurant by the ocean on a small island in northern Norway.

12. Apparently, one of the most important pieces of information you can convey to a Norwegian shopper is the opening hours for your business. All businesses had signs that read something like: "COOP 8-19 (10-17)" in equally large print. Coop is the store name, and the numbers mean that it's open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. I haven't seen that in any other country.

13. I bought a couple of apples at a grocery store in Tromsø. Instead of handing my coins to the cashier, I was told to drop them into a slot in a machine. The machine counted my coins and gave me the change. Kinda cool.

14. I think I had my happiest moment when I found myself on a bus driving on an uneven road in the outskirts of a city on an obscure island somewhere in northern Norway, unsure of whether I was going to find the museum I was looking for but not really caring. That's when traveling is fun.

15. I started to feel bad for the mountains in northern Norway. Think about the Wasatch Front or the Swiss Alps: the mountains are spectacular, and millions of people see them every day. The mountains in northern Norway are equally spectacular, but they probably haven't been seen by a million people in the whole history of the world. It seems like a horrible waste of a good mountain. It's probably a sign that one's sanity is slipping when one starts to anthropomorphize mountains that don't really care where they are, but that's what I found myself doing.

16. Despite the high cost of living in Norway, I managed to live within my means. When I arrived in Oslo, I withdrew 3200 Norwegian kroner, the equivalent of about $495. My goal was to make that last. It had to cover museums, transportation, food, souvenirs, everything but hotel and air, which were prepaid. I realize that living on $80 a day probably isn't the stuff of legend, but I returned with 16.5 Norwegian kroner in my pocket, the equivalent of about $2.50.

17. The Norwegians are big on polar exploration. It was a Norwegian who first made it to the South Pole. Another Norwegian had a theory that the ice at the North Pole drifts along an ocean current. To prove his point, he built a ship that was designed to withstand being stuck in the ice. He and his crew of ten then sailed north until they hit the ice. (This was in the early 1900s.) They then stopped and waited to be frozen in. Sure enough, they were. They drifted along with the ice current for three years until they popped out on the other side, then they sailed back home. They all lived through it.

18. Norwegians are very nice and aren't nearly as arrogant as some other European countries, but they're very defensive and resentful of the world's attitude toward their practices of seal and whale hunting. They see it as part of their cultural heritage. At least they no longer hunt baby seals.

19. Ever since they gave up the Viking thing about a thousand years ago and quit raping and killing anyone they could find, Norway's fate has largely been in the hands of others. They were ruled by Denmark for a long time, and then they were basically given away to Sweden. In the early 1900s, they politely asked the Swedes for their independence, and it was granted. (No Revolutionary War for the Norwegians.) Then Norway was occupied by Germany during the Second World War despite their proclamation of neutrality. Because of their oil, though, Norway now has the highest standard of living in the world by some measures.

Okay, I didn't hit 24 items. As I was going through the list, I decided that some of them would go better with pictures when I get around to doing some real blogs about the trip.

I highly recommend Norway. It was a lot of fun. For the next time when my family leaves me alone in Switzerland for a month, I've got my sights on Greenland and/or Iceland. Now that would be fun.