journal 6 June 2026
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Stop 01 of 11
Oslo
The capital opens the trip. Sculpture parks, Viking ships, and the long walk between the palace and the harbor.
Day 1 belongs to the Lindseth family — Norwegian-American friends of Kirsten and Dave from their Concordia College years. Marit and Ole drive up from Horten (a coastal town an hour and a half south of Oslo). Their two children, Live (born ~1995) and Sindre (born ~1998), now live in Oslo and join from there. The day moves through Roseslottet, Ekeberg Sculpture Park, and Vigeland Park together.
The first Monday may also include a get-together with Sandra Dvergastein — a friend of Live's who lived with Kirsten and Dave's household as an exchange student from August 2013 to February 2014 — and her father Bjørn Dvergastein.
Why this place
Oslo is where the trip assembles itself. Flights from across the U.S. and Europe converge in the capital before the first day even ends.
What happens here
Day 1 moves through three of the city’s open-air anchors: Roseslottet, the hilltop museum on the WWII occupation; Ekeberg Sculpture Park above the harbor; and Vigeland Park with its 200-odd bronze figures, in the rain or in the long northern light. The first night is at Scandic Holmenkollen Park high above the city; the next two at The Thief Hotel on Tjuvholmen, on the harbor.
Day 2 is for the city on its own terms. The Royal Palace at the head of Karl Johans gate. The Viking Ship Museum (newly renamed the Museum of the Viking Age) and its three preserved longships. City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is presented each December. The slow walk down Karl Johans gate between the palace and Oslo S.
Background
Oslo is small for a European capital — about 700,000 people in the city proper, around a million in the metro — and almost everything worth seeing is walkable from the harbor. The fjord folds directly into downtown.
The city is one of the oldest in Scandinavia. Founded around 1040 on the eastern shore of the Oslofjord, it was the seat of medieval Norwegian power for centuries before Bergen and Trondheim each took their turn. A catastrophic fire in 1624 burned the old town to the ground; King Christian IV moved the city west to the foot of Akershus Fortress and rebuilt it on a Renaissance grid, renaming it Christiania in his own honour. The name held for three hundred years before Norway took it back in 1925, two decades after winning independence from Sweden.
What the trip sees today on the waterfront — the Opera House (2008), Aker Brygge, Tjuvholmen, the new Munch Museum (2021), the cluster around Bjørvika — is mostly a 21st-century redevelopment of what used to be shipyards and dockland. The older city sits inland from it, around the palace and Karl Johans gate. The shift from working harbor to walkable cultural front took about twenty years and reshaped the city’s image of itself.
In Oslo
Eat · Buy · Do
A short list of places to taste, things to bring home, and things to see.