On our bike tour yesterday, Clay and Jean and pretty much everybody else on the tour, didn’t get to see much of the Vigeland Sculpture Garden on our stop there. The park is big and there are dozens of Vigeland sculptures. We had a total of about 15 minutes there, not nearly enough to see much of anything. So we hopped on the city bus and buzzed right there. The tour buses were already there disgorging hordes of crazed Chinese and Italians shooting endless selfies in front of anything remotely interesting. Luckily they move in packs so eventually they move on and leave you alone. At least we got to take our time and soak in the experience. It was fascinating to follow his life-timeline from birth to death in the hundreds of figures.
When we were done, we hopped on the tram (trolley) and headed for Bygdoy, a wooded peninsula that is home to the Kon-Tiki Museum, the Norwegian Maritime Museum, the Viking Ship Museum, the Norske Folkemuseum and a museum housing the polar explorer ship Fram. We opted for the Viking Ship Museum. It was cool. They had found the remains of three viking ships that were dated at between 800 A.D. and 1200 A.D. They were removed from the farm fields where they were discovered and moved to the museum. These were burial ships. They would take an old ship and use it for a burial crypt. The dead were interred along with everything they would need in the afterlife: food, drink, weapons, jewelry and in one case, a dozen horses and two dogs. Unfortunately, the burial ships had all been plundered, so there wasn’t a lot of the valuable metal work and weapons when it was excavated. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the ships was the fact that they were ocean going. They are not long, no more the 40 feet. The beam was quite wide and the draft was decent, but it was hard to imagine how it could weather long trips at sea. Plus there didn’t seem to be anywhere for people to take shelter. God knows how hard the life aboard was. No wonder they were feared.