August 15

We awoke from another great night of sleep on the Schluckebier’s couches and were promptly informed that we would soon be taking part in a Saturday morning Danish tradition. Brian went to the bakery to get bread and pastries for our Danish style breakfast. The best part was the authentic Danish pastries fresh from the bakery. Complimented with some juice and tea, it made for quite a delectable experience. After breakfast, we woke Jonas and Jakob (who may or may not have been a little hung over) to make sure that we got a picture of the family before Brian and Hanne had to leave to meet a friend. Unfortunately, Brian seemed to be coming down with a cold in which I felt responsible for since I had just gotten a small cold when we arrived. He blamed it on his helicopter training course, but I’m sure I had something to do with it. After they left, we hung out with the boys for about an hour before Jonas generously took us to the train station in his new previously owned car. Apparently it is a big deal for a teenager to have a car in Denmark since they have an expression that in Denmark, you buy a car and pay for three. This expression is in reference to the Danish tax of about 180% on any car purchase.

At the main Copenhagen train station, I bought two McDoubles from McDonalds for the trip and we were on our way to Oslo. The rain never stopped during the eight hour ride. Oslo is called the European Sunshine Capital north of the Alps, yet we never saw the sun the entire day. Norway is a beautiful country, though, despite the dark skies. So far, we may have seen more water than land. The entire train ride through Norway saw lakes and rivers surrounded by massive forests on both sides of the train. After we made it to Oslo, we immediately started looking for a place to spend the night. Since Norway is the most expensive country in Europe, we knew we weren’t going be sleeping in a bed somewhere and the rain was still coming down, so finding a place to sleep was going to be a little tricky. We found a corner in the mall inside the train station, but we were pretty confident that we would be getting kicked out shortly after. I was able to connect to the internet and talk to all my family members at the Zimmer family reunion. It was nice to see everybody, but it made me wish I was there, especially when Grandpa came on to tell me that he just cooked me a great big burger with all the fixings.

We got kicked out of the mall shortly after and we moved to our next spot. We found a stairwell to sleep under in the main part of the train station. As we were just starting to doze off (as it always seems to happen) we were awoken by two security guards informing us that we were not allowed to sleep in the train station. We then had to come up with more desperate plans. It was a little chilly outside and the clouds looked capable of dropping some more rain on us at anytime. We needed to employ rule #39 of the Blaise Zimmer Guide to Backpacking Europe which reads as follows: “When looking for a place to sleep in a big city, just hop on a train to the airport. There are a bunch of nice spots to set up camp in airports.” We ended up finding a nice secluded corner spot in the upper level that seldom saw any travelers walking by. There were also free bathrooms (if you can imagine this as a luxury) nearby, so we finally fell asleep around midnight. The only problem with the spot was the occasional announcement on the loudspeaker and the broken ticket machine that incessantly beeped throughout the night. Other than that, we slept great.