Norway (August 2016)

The trip began last winter with a question from Nancy: “Is there something special you would like to do for your 75th birthday?” That’s a border I’m hoping to cross November 2nd. We began playing with the idea of going somewhere we’d never been before and had an itch to visit. Quite a long list emerged. Somehow Norway slowly drifted to the top -- a land of Vikings who gave up Viking-ing once they became Christians, and a land of mountainous fjords (what a contrast with flat, sandy Holland). Friendships are almost always a major factor whenever we go anywhere -- in this case this would mean an opportunity to get to know better Addison Hart, with whom I have corresponded for many years of correspondence, and his iconographer wife Solrunn Nes, whose book “The Uncreated Light” I keep returning to. A visit to Norway about the time of my actual birthday seemed too arctic a season to be heading so far north but we decided that going a few months early was okay -- after all I was a thriving six-month-old passenger in my mother’s womb in August 1941. I sounded out Addison and Solrunn about the possibility of staying in a bed-and-breakfast somewhere near them. They encouraged us to stay with them. And we said yes!