vacation Friday (June 12): travel to Norway

Today was travel to Norway, do laundry, and relax a bit.  I would say that we accomplished all of those.

Before we left the LEGO hotel, Joshua sent an email to our tour guide.  He had mentioned several times that the robotic lawn mowers should have LEGO horses on top of them and wanted someone to do something about this.  We decided that she would probably be the best person to email, since the people at the front desk barely seemed to care about anything.  She replied with a lovely response: "I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THE IDEA!!! 🤩 And that is another reason why you anyhhd Isaac are such awesome LEGO builders! Thank you so much for sharing and have the best summer building, playing, and having super-duper fun! 🥳✨"

The flight itself was unremarkable, other than we got to the airport too early and still didn't have a gate.  (To be fair, we only got a gate about 45 minutes in advance, and the internet said we should be there before then.  We weren't sure if this counted as international travel, etc., so we went a bit early.)  There was a fosball table that Isaac, Joshua, Cheryl, and Ben played at for a bit and we relaxed in comfy chairs instead of uncomfy ones by the gate.

Waiting for the bus.

The LEGO store had a hand print detector that would tell you which minifig you were.  All of them were soccer players.  I know the world cup had just started, but a few other options would have been nice.

Coming into Norway!

We got to Bergen and Ben was still debating on how to get to the city center.  We thought we might be able to make the bus and so we walked quickly and just made it.  Yay!  On the way though, as we walked and walked and walked through the airport, we saw the city sign.  It said, "Bergen?" and made us all laugh.  I didn't have time to take a picture of it then, but got a picture of it on the way out.

We got to the hotel and dropped off our luggage in the luggage waiting area.  There were so many suitcases.  It was locked and secure, but at the same time a little sketchy.  It was good that we had gotten bags from the fan tour.  I had separated everything that needed to be washed in the vacuum bags, but it was much easier to dump the vacuum bag (with no handles) into the fan tour bag (with handles).  I sure we could have used back packs or something otherwise but this worked nicely.

We had also been debating on how to do the laundry.  There was a drop off service close to the hotel, but there was also a laundromat pretty close too.  I decided we'd at least try the laundromat because it would be a lot cheaper and, for the most part, it worked pretty well.  We went before we got lunch (early afternoon at this point) because I had read that it can get busy in the evening.  Getting everything in the washing machines was no problem.  They started and we went to lunch.

There was a burger place not too far away, so we headed there.  Cheryl and I finished just in time to go back to the laundromat and change the clothes from wash to dry.  Again, no issues.  The dryer seemed to think it was only going to take a half hour, which I was surprised about but foolishly believed.  Cheryl and I walked back to the restaurant as the others were finishing up and as it started to rain.  Not a huge rain, but enough rain that we got our rain jackets out.  We bought some cookies at a nearby but crazy-busy bakery and then went back to the laundromat.

Well, we obviously don't need five people waiting around for the laundry.  It was only supposed to take fifteen more minutes, so Isaac stayed with me and everyone else went home.  Well, the dryer kept adding more time.  Not so much time that we could leave and come back, but enough time.  Cheryl's stuff finished.  Hooray!  One of our dryers said that the dryer plinth was full.  I have no idea what a dryer plinth is.  I attempted to clean something out, but then it stopped the cycle and there isn't an easy way to restart without repaying and getting a refund.  I was annoyed, but when I felt the clothes they were all dry except for one sweatshirt, and even that was just a little damp.  I took the clothes out and looked with suspicion at the last machine.  It kept adding time.  Isaac didn't have his book, and I was done playing heads up.  I gave up a few minutes later and took the clothes out.  They were plenty dry and it was a good call.  We stuffed all the clothes back into the bags (which were especially nice now, since the clothes were folded and compact like upon arrival) and went back to the hotel.

We were relaxing and about to have cookies now that Isaac and I returned, only to find that Ben had left his water bottle at the laundromat.  I went to get it because that's what I wanted to do.  It ended up being a beautiful walk.  It was slightly drizzly, but just enough to make it enjoyable and not too wet.  I attempted to make the walk without my phone since we had been all over this area several times now.  I did take one wrong turn into a dead end, but it was a short dead end and I was back on the correct path quickly.  Our cookies were salted caramel and brown cheese.  I forgot which one I liked better, but I expect it was the brown cheese.  It is something that Norway is known for and we had it on all sorts of items throughout the next week.

Our hotel room was amazing.  It had plenty of room for four people, plus a sitting area.  The shower doors were weird though.  The shower was in a corner (two of the shower walls) and each other shower wall was a glass door that had a magnetic closure.  When unused, it added a small amount of room to the already large bathroom.  When trying to get in and out of the shower, it was awkward.  On top of that, our room looked out onto the fish market and part of the fjord.

We had a pretty late lunch, so we decided on waffles for dinner.  Cheryl and I went to get them and got to walk through the fish market, which was really interesting!  There were shark heads and sea urchin and lobsters and whale.  The waffles were delicious too.

Ben took a ton of pictures of us from the hotel room on our way over and back.

Ben and Joshua enjoyed our pick-a-brick LEGOS while waiting.

We were winding down for the night and the kids were complaining about having to sleep in the same bed again.  I guess not complaining, but just the "oh, Lego Hotel was really nice because we didn't have to sleep in the same bed."  Well, I noticed a pull tab on the couch and while Isaac wasn't looking gave it a small tug to confirm that it would open up.  It did!  Ben went down to ask for another set of sheets and when the front desk looked at him oddly he just said, "My kids don't like sleeping in the same bed."  And the frond desk completely understood.  Isaac was so excited when we opened up the bed for him.  He didn't care that Joshua got the bigger one or that we were going to make it into a couch during the day.  He was just really happy to sleep by himself.

We looked it up as we were going to sleep too...There was only 1.5 hours of pure dark along with another 3 hours of darkish.  The curtains in all our rooms were great and blackout though, so we didn't need to sleeping masks that we brought.

Oh my.  A whole day completed in one post.

Friday: chores

Today I got a ton of chores done.  Sure, I don't love chores, but it does feel good to get them done.  The kitchen even stayed clean all day.  (This summer I peaked at 101 to-do items, but most of the time it was around 75-80.  Today I finished at 64, so things are going down...for now.

Joshua remembered that we needed second day pictures.

Everyone's second days seemed good to fine.  They actually started doing things, which is nice.

vacation Thursday, part 3 (June 11): Aahous

Then we were getting close to the end, but making sure that we had at least looked at everything.  We were by what was expected to be a dead end because the installation at the end wasn't open yet.  I walked down the hallway to double check and some doors automatically opened and I went, "whoa."  I summoned everyone else.  The installation was called "the populace" bu Nina Beier & John Miller and was bunch of mannequins going about their day in a huge room.  There was one other person in the room with us at the beginning, but he left pretty quickly.  So then we had the room to ourselves and still found ourselves whispering.  It was a bit eerie.  Obviously, we played some hide-and-seek.  My hair was in a ponytail which gave it away as all the other women had their hair down.  I thought about it while Joshua was seeking me, but if I moved to take my hair down he would have seen the movement.

We found a few more rooms near the basement, but the kids were very interested in the playground outside.  The rain had been on and off, but it was currently off so we went out.  We stayed there a bit, but it was a rather normal playground so we didn't stay long.  Joshua also got a sliver around this time, but it wasn't sticking out enough to get.  His response?  "Can we find a doctor or something here?"  Inwardly I said "no way...we don't get hurt on vacation" and outwordly I said that I had bandaids in my backpack that we could get shortly.  I believe that it hurt a lot, but it was not doctor worthy.

We finished up and went back inside to get our stuff.  As normal, we stopped at the bathroom...which was a unisex one.  Honestly, it was a great idea.  The stalls were all floor-to-ceiling individual stalls, and then everyone just washed their hands at the closest sink.  We saw this is a few other places too, but it was such a good idea to prevent lines on one side or the other.

We walked around the city center a bit.  The kids hopped over rocks in a man-made stream, we went to some tall trees, and we looked for a game store.  The game store wasn't really what we wanted, so we didn't stay there long.  Pizza for dinner again, but I love pizza so it worked.  (I do think that was the last time we had pizza on the trip though.)

I don't remember the exact context, but one of the kids said something like, "oh, those are cool trees.  I wish we could see them" ...as we were walking up to them.

The pizza slices were gigantic!

We went back to the parking garage and thought we'd go one floor higher to a little overlook bridge.  Well, this overlook was much more exciting than we realized.  I thought there was a restaurant over the overlook bridge and so it wouldn't be appropriate to go any farther, but it turned out that there was just a really nice room with bathrooms.  We could continue to walk on the roof and there were several seating areas and a few special overlook places.  To think we almost missed it!

The sun kept going in and out, so some pictures are sunny and others aren't.  You can see the rainbow bridge in the distance.

This was the church was saw at Legoland the day before.

They had some artsy benches that were almost for playing on but not quite.  They weren't very exciting to play on, although still interesting as benches go.

Near the end we were waiting for Ben and everyone sat on Joshua.  I'm not sure why, but two views of the same scene was interesting.

We drove home and I made Ben bring the rental car back.  We debated a bit about bringing it back in the evening or in the morning, but if it was in the morning we would have to be up and out earlier and I just wasn't feeling comfortable with it.  To be fair, I packed the whole time he was bringing the car back, so we both worked.

Joshua got an owl with his treasure hunt and put it by the other owls in the room.

Isaac wanted to walk the playline one last time, so I went out with him.  We only walked the fun part and then we walked the fun part back.  During this time Ben and Joshua went to build some butterflies as part of the butterfly challenge the hotel had.

Here we are again: extra vowels

We eventually got to bed and Ben pushed one of the light switches by his bed to turn off his light.  It turned off all the lights!  Whoever was in the bathroom yelled at us.  I also wanted to comment on the beds while I'm talking about sleeping.  Both hotels used individual duvets, which was fine.  It wasn't too hot, so for the most part not having a sheet was ok and it was really easy to stick your feet out if you did get too hot.  The weird part about the duvets is that housekeeping always folded them sideways.  So in order to open up the duvet you needed to turn it 90 deg and then open them up to put on yourself.  While a minor annoyance, it was surprisingly annoying.