August 10th - Oslo to Flam

I had a few people asked me about the breakfast bar so I included a few pictures to describe that to you. We will start off with the bread bar portion of the breakfast buffet. These breads and rolls were fresh (and often still warm)from a private bakery, not a commercial bakery, so they weren't perfectly sliced and some of them you had to slice yourself.

Starting from the left side of the sandwich material bar, the first one there with the red sauce was smoked mackerel in tomato sauce, then smoked trout, pate`, turkey, salami, and ham. Right next to the ham, the yellow round things you see, are pads of butter.

Moving on down the line from the right side you see some cucumbers, red and yellow peppers, four different kinds of cheeses, tomatoes, pickles, red beets, and cottage cheese. On over to the left those white pitchers contained a few different flavors of yogurt. The two tubes in the left front foreground are tubes of either mayonnaise or caviar mustard.  Not pictured were a variety of grains for cereal, dried fruit, hard-boiled and soft-boiled eggs, a few different varieties of nuts, scrambled eggs, bacon, turkey meatballs, small sausages, some beans that resembled baked beans, freshly made waffles, Danish pastries, and our favorite, freshly made croissants spread with Nutella. All the places we have stayed all had a good variety for breakfast but this particular place had the best variety.

After eating breakfast and checking out of a hotel, we walked into the Oslo train station and looked up at the board for our departure platform. It's not much different than going to the airport and checking for the departure gate.

The next several pictures are the countryside we saw on our train from Oslo to Myrdal.  This train heads north out of Oslo to the fjord area and it was just beautiful the whole time. We could not take enough pictures to do it any justice at all. When we first started out we saw pristine farms, a lot of trees, mostly pine but some hardwoods, and beautiful lakes. Then as we got higher up in elevation we saw magnificent waterfalls, very rocky areas, glaciers, and beautiful rivers. Our opportunity to get pictures was limited due to the shelters built over the tracks to help protect it from the snow. 

Once we reached Myrdal, we changed trains to the famous Flamsbana Rail Road that takes you from Myrdal down through the Flam Valley to the village of Flam.