Bought a Troll today...

Not too many days in your life you can say that....

• [By the way, for those of you who are not so technologically advanced... where there are words highlighted in a different colour, you can click on them and you will be taken to another website that has some video of where it is we've been. I am using other people's video as it takes a good deal of time to upload video, and I'm lazy, so if you see other people in 'our' videos, don't be alarmed...!]

I am convinced that there is no bad view of or over Bergen. We rode up the fenicular 850 metres to a lookout/restaurant/forest walk kind of place... Fløyen. Then went to the Hanseatic Museum and the Rosencrantz Tower - see about 2.28min in this vid... dating back over 900 years. Aust feels so young...
The fish markets smelt as you would imagine, but other than that, Bergen has such an iceberg clean kind of smell. The forest up the top of the hill was mossy, with tall pines and birch trees. We rounded a lake where 3 strapping young lads had just taken a 'bath'. They looked sufficiently braced against the cold, with the more malleable apendages retreating to warmer climes... They said that they were camping for 3 weeks. This may have been their first wash. In this part of Europe one can camp for free on any public land.
We have been particularly lucky with the weather, as Bergen just broke it's own record for the most days in row that it has rained... over 100! They average just under 2.5 metres of rain/year.
It doesn't get really really dark here till after 11pm, so the kids are living a little more at the end of the day than usual... for eg, Jude and Helga are out for a walk now and it's just after 10pm... but just the beginning of twilight. At the height of summer they really only get 2 hours of semi darkness - midnight til 2am.... makes it great for sightseeing... but hard to get the kids to bed...
Zoe bought a moose finger puppet today... and for some reason chose to call it 'Seagull'. Can't quite predict how she'll go on this kind of thing... I hope she marries well.
Tuesday just gone, we spent the day on a ferry pottering up some of Norway's most famous fiords... the Sognefjord [pronounced Sogg-ne-fiord]. The longest fiord in the world at 204km. The weather was quite moody, perhaps taking it's lead from our youngest, but it only enhanced the drama of the setting - unlike our youngest! People have built their houses in the most incredible places... and we continue to be amazed at how this planet shows us its maker [sorry, a little bit o' religion there...]
Make sure you have a look at our online picture album every few days, as sometimes I upload more pics to the same album... I am just about to load some shots of the fiords and Bergen fenicular....

US, Denmark, Norway...

Hi all...
Apologies for the delay in getting this to air.. there was a problem with our sponsors. So many have written asking for more pictures. Noone particularly asking to see shots of me... but I can only guess as to why...
I am uploading pictures from our day in New York, couple of days in Copenhagen, and of today in Bergen, Norway. If you EVER get the chance to come and see Skandinavia you just have to...
New Jersey/New York...
Staying with Rob and Joanna and their kids in New Jersey. Just to prove that I am hip and up to date with my political correctness I have a friend from Costa Rica. Well, his parent are from there, but he was born here. But his skin is dark... does that count for being differently ethnically abled?
We did the bus ride around Manhattan for a number of hours. Again, the kids were great, and were pretty wide eyed most of the time. On the ferry out to Ellis Island, we were able to stand right in the front of the boat, and Jude had a Titanic moment. Coincidentally, we passed the mooring on the Hudson River that the Titanic would have docked at should history have been written differently. Another fame-claim that the americans have owned. I was feeling strange about visiting Ground Zero - like I would have some kind of epiphany about world peace, but it was a construction site with excavatos and bulldozers and a lot of men standing around in smelly blue tshirts whistling at girls... ok, I made that last bit up, but you can see how my sense of romance was jarred a little. But there is a church right next door that somehow survived and is a kind of living memorial of mementos and for mourners and distant participants like us. Time Sqaure was a riot, and by the time we got home we'd been going more than 7 hours. Did I mention that we have amazing children?
Quite a long flight to Denmark on Wednesday, and an overnight flight at that. The kids slept about 3 of the 7.5 hours, and Jude and I took turns sitting next to a grownup adolescent american rap DJ who did karaoke to his ipod and talked loudly to his DoughBoy mate in the seat in front... God bless Cattle Class!
Cobenhavn, Denmark...
We checked into our first Hostel of the trip feeling very grumpy and not altogether the model family. There was an aussie guy working there who was very helpful and we were soon asleep for a few hours. Feeling like death-warmed-up-only-slightly we searched for food and went for a walk along a canal in Christianshavn - a bohemian enclave taken over by the uppermiddle classes who wish to have the appearance of coolness. I'm glad it didn't alter the actual architecture, just the atmosphere for the locals...
Day two presented us with the chance to putter along the canals in downtown, and for an hour or so, we oohed and aahed at the kind of lifestyle that we'd have had if either of us had married 'old money'.
We then spent the next 9 or so hours at the Tivoli... Until we left at around 10.30pm the kids literally didn't stop to breathe. They went on every ride they were allowed.. .about 21 at last count... the only thing stopping them was a height restriction. Spin, whirl, jump, slam, laugh, trip, steer, pull, laugh, scream, and laugh... [sounds like a church service to me...]
It is the most enchanting place I've been, and Aaron reckons his best day of his life. Big boast from an 8 year old...! Jude and I even went on the spinny-upsidedown-double loop-the-loop-corkscrew one... once.
We felt our time in Cobenhavn was far too short, with only an hour left before the plane left to race through 24 viking rooms at the national museum. Interesting, but I don't think I got much detail! ha
Bergen, Norway
We are staying here with a fantastic couple we met in Egypt in 2000. Of course, we are older and greyer, and they are not, but it has been a very warm and generous welcome. I cannot believe how beautiful it is here. Just agape. Bergen is hosting a port-of-call for an annual tall-ships race, and so today we walked - in the rain [about 1000 inches/year!] - around the harbour and had a geezer. We are planning a fiords and mountain pass kind of tour on Tuesday, so I'll post some more pictures after that....
You have to come to Norway.... really! Well, not right now... but sometime soon, before some blasted aussie builds the Big Viking or something and ruins it...

Our human spirit

This has been brewing for a while, but has had less polish than a begger's best silver...
A couple of days ago, I was mulling over the fact that it seems 'sacreligious that our ordinary selves be involved in this journey of ours'. Know what I mean? Having to adjudicate in spats between Zoe and Aaron, and us arguing about which off-ramp to take while driving. Even eating our personal meals [feasting with friends somehow seems more noble], keeping our toenails clipped, finding another toilet for Zoe, deciding that yesterday's tshirt is still not smelly enough to warrant a full laundry load... seems to detract from the grandeur of the vision, the beauty of the journey, that my actual self is somehow tainting the purity of it.
I've been wrestling with this incongruity and it's a division of my own making [I reckon]. In the past I have found comfort in a monk's place of silence - separating my physical from my spirit, as though my body has no place in heaven - but I don't think a full life is to be lived out there. When I feel I'm living a full life, the ordinary is full of food and feasts, good wine, and beaches, and sport, towering trees, huge farts [all too often I'm afraid] and laughing so hard I can't control my saliva... and companionship, planning a life, brushing the hair from Zoe's eyes when she's asleep, good loving [not often enough I'm afraid], dreaming of what might be, sharing people's stories, watching mine unfold... all of the stuff that is 'ordinary' - but FULL of life.
If life in the spirit is anything at all, it has to be about these things. Ok, maybe not the farts.
Hopefully we return from this trip more ordinary than before...