Stacey Explores

Oslo

Once landing at Oslo Gardermoen Airport, you can catch the “flytoget” train to the city centre which takes 19 minutes and costs £16.50. Conveniently there’s also a bunch of luggage lockers at Oslo Central Station which cost €5 for the day – so we dropped our bags off headed for some breakfast.

We only had 5 hours in Oslo, so we quickly jumped on the bus towards Vikingskipene – where the highest rated attractions of Oslo sit. You can download the app “Ruter” and purchase a 4-zone, 60 minute ticket for about £9.

The Viking Ship Museum is one of the highest suggested attractions when you Google “things to do in Oslo”. It costs £10, but like a lot of museums you can receive a discount with a valid student card. I had also received personal recommendations for this museum, and Chris & I LOVE Viking history – but quite frankly, we were disappointed. The main attraction can be viewed from the gift shop, giving the illusion that the remainder of the museum will be equally as impressive. Unfortunately this was not the case. As Oslo is an expensive city to visit, if you are tight on budget I would recommend simply viewing the ship from the gift shop and picking up a free information leaflet.

As we’d driven past on the bus, I was interested in visiting the Norsk Folkemuseum – an open air museum where you can wander into buildings from the 1200s onwards. If you’re into your Vikings, you’ll see more here than in the ship museum! As a building nerd, this was one of the most interesting museums I have ever visited and would 110% recommend a visit here if you are in the area. The tickets were a similar price to that of the ship museum, and we spent about x4 of the time.

Next, we headed back to the city centre and met with some friends who had coincidentally travelled on the same weekend as us. We met at the Oslo Opera House for coffee and watched the never ending sun set. The Opera house is a majestic and loud combination of raw material finishes such as glass, timber and metal – peacefully offset by the calm water of the harbour. We remained full of praise for the Norsk Folkemuseum, and our friends visited the thanked us greatly for the recommendation the next day.

Our time in Oslo quickly came to an end as we had to board our accommodation for the night – the DFDS night ferry from Oslo to Copenhagen!

If we were to spend more time in Oslo, we would have visited the Norweigan Fjords, and definitely tried out some of the saunas at the dockside!

DFDS Mini Cruise

Neither of us have ever been on a cruise or mini cruise – and our only experience with DFDS was the ferry crossing between Dover and Dunkirk/Calais. I’ll put it out there in this intro – we had a great experience!

For £123 we booked a “Commodore Class” cabin, which had a double bed, windows, a TV, towels and a private bathroom. The rate also included breakfast; which could be ordered to the room at no extra charge.

On board there were 3 or 4 restaurants, bars with evening entertainment, and a night club – which I have to admit, we didn’t make much use of! Food was as reasonably priced as you can expect on a transit between two Scandinavian countries. One thing I would suggest is reserving a table at your preferred restaurant as early as possible, as we did wait for about 30 minutes.

After a long day of travelling we had a great rest and opted for the buffet breakfast which included pancakes; so it gets 5 stars from me! The ship docked at 9.30am, and we were asked to disembark by 10.15am.

We particularly loved this experience because it forced us to relax for once – which is something we never seem to prioritise on our quick stop breaks!

Copenhagen

Conveniently, there was a DFDS bus on the dockside which dropped us off outside Copenhagen Central Station (Kobenhavn), next to Tivoli park – which we wanted to visit but turns out it is closed for most of January!

In our transit, we had planned a little walking route of Copenhagen to tick off all the things we wanted to see. I’ve attached the map below. We didn’t walk the whole thing, as we do enjoy the novelty of electric scooters when they’re available!

Amongst the general sightseeing, we visited the Danish War Museum – which displayed the history of the Scandinavian past, and we learned more about how the area had previously been divided.

Another highlight was obviously Nyhavn. I say obviously, as this is must be the most photographed area of the city which you’ve definitely seen on Instagram! To be fair, it’s earned it’s much-photographed status as it’s rainbow coloured buildings like up the streets even on the greyest of days! You can enjoy a luscious lunch here, and the area is particularly famous for its seafood – so expect fish on the menu.

Lastly, Chris and I love a tower so we visited the top of the round tower at dusk. Climbing the tower was mostly a ramp, contrasting to the hundreds of steps we normally have to climb! We managed to capture some pretty moody looking photos…

With enough time, we ate some dinner and collected our bags from a 2nd bag drop at Copenhagen (København) Station. You can easily catch a train from this station directly to the airport.

This weekend a perfect kick start to a year of great travels! You can see from the photos above that we saw the grandest range of Scandinavian architecture all in just under 15 hours of sightseeing… The difference to this weekend was the amount of relaxing that we also got to do, thanks to the cabin on the DFDS cruise – available to book on Booking.com!

Travel & Accommodation: £97/per person

Date travelled: January 2020

Duration: 1 night

 

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