Three things we found in Norway that were completely unexpected:

1. Food isn’t just pricey, it’s outrageously expensive. A Big Mac at McDonalds: $14. Two smoothies and a sandwich: $35 (Jamie thought the price was well worth it because Max, the smoothie boy, was a cute and French). Two gourmet hamburgers: $42 each. They tasted great, but I damn near choked when the bill arrived.

2. Everyone smokes. Everyone. Non-stop. Kind of ruins the pleasure of an outdoor cafe.

3. Arab beggers on every corner, but not a Nordic-looking begger to be found. A few Nordic drunks passed out on a few corners, but no beggars.

While walking outside the Norwegian royal palace today I said something dumb and immediately started trying to correct myself. Jamie looked at me and said, “Diggin’ your hole out of a grave, are you?”

That’s what we call a “Robinson-ism”. Jamie’s late grandfather’s last name was Robinson and this mixing of metaphors and making up words and phrases seems to be genetic because at least three generations of Robinsons have been afflicted with it.

Some of Jamie’s are hilarious, others are mysterious, and some are just plain deep thoughts stumbled upon accidentally.

Unfortunately, she’s much more careful since I started my “Robinson-ism” file so her Robinson-isms are now far fewer and much farther between. So I treasure each of them more than ever.

Damn, we had a good day. A perfect day, in fact. The sun was out and so were we — the Edvard Munch Museum (where they have one of the five versions of “The Scream”), the Viking Museum (where they have three 1000-year old Viking ships), the Kon-Tiki Museum (Thor Heyerdahl’s original raft is there), and Frogner Park’s bizarre, erotic statues (hubba hubba).

We absolutely love Oslo. We’d have come here years ago had we known what a cool city it is. It’s compact enough to get around easily and quickly. The streets are filled with colorful people and costumes from everywhere in the world. Jamie likes it more than Paris and I like it more than London, but neither of us is willing to say we like it more than Sydney. Not yet.

Picking hotels on the internet is always a bit of a crapshoot, but we lucked out on this one. The Comfort Grand Central is in the city’s original 1850s train station. It sits at one end of the main street and the royal palace sits at the other end. The hotel’s main entrance is so small we thought it was a side entrance, but the concierge told us that they can never enlarge it because of the building’s historic status. Nevertheless, the inside of the hotel is cool and hip and modern.

And the best part as far as Jamie’s concerned? The view out our room’s window is the new, contemporary Oslo Opera House.

First time we’ve seen blue skies since we left San Luis Obispo. The sweaters came off, the sun screen went on.

And now let’s pause for yet another seemingly unrelated story that really isn’t:

Our good friends the Ginsbergs were — for reasons I can neither remember nor imagine — aboard a train that passed through my hometown, Colton, California.

Colton was probably the only city in Southern California that lost population in the booming 1960s. Even as a kid I knew it was a place I knew I had to get out of as soon as possible. Sometime back in the late 50s or early 60s the city council or the Chamber of Commerce or some other civic-minded group came up with a slogan they hoped would act as a perfume to disguise the stench of death that enveloped the town.

“Colton. Hub of Industry, Center of Progress.”

They must have believed their own delusions because they posted the slogan in huge individual letters on the side of a grain mill that overlooked the adjacent Interstate 10 Freeway. Soon after they attached the letters to the building, the grain mill went out of business. And it wasn’t long before the mooring on the “H” failed and it began dangling and blowing in the wind.

That pretty much sums of my image of Colton: A nonsense slogan hanging askew on an abandoned building.

But back to the Ginsbergs: Young Jack was horrified by the miserable conditions he saw from the train.

“Dad, is this really where Jim comes from?” he asked. “It’s awful.”

Dan calmly explained that railroads pass through the worst, dirtiest, most industrial sections of whatever towns they pass through. Jack felt a bit better about it.

Times passes. One day Jack finds himself aboard a team bus on its way to a baseball tournament somewhere in the hinterlands beyond Colton. He takes out his cell phone and calls his dad.

“Dad, I’m on the bus and we’re passing through Colton. It doesn’t look any better from the bus than it did from the train.”

And that brings us back (you knew I’d bring it back eventually, didn’t you?) to our current train trip from Stavanger to Oslo. It’s a cold, rainy, foggy day and we’ve learned that not all towns look terrible from the train. We’ve been passing through green farms and meadows and forests and quaint little towns that look absolutely delightful. They couldn’t be prettier.

I wonder how they say “Hub of Industry, Center of Progress” in Norwegian.

UPDATE: I just used Google Translate to look it up. It’s “Industrisentrum, Sentrum av Fremgang”. Trust me, Colton may have the gangs, but Norway has the fremgangs.

I showed proof in a previous post that the girls in Norway are stunning. Need more proof? Here are the three cutest girls we’ve seen so far.

We were walking in Stavanger’s Old Town and found them playing in a public fountain in their raincoats.

Is that cute or what?

Our original itinerary had us flying directly from Reykjavik to Oslo, Norway. But Jamie ran across a description of Pulpit Rock and wanted to see it. We changed the itinerary and flew to Bergen, on Norway’s west coast, and then took the Speed Ferry down to Stavanger, the departure point for trips to Pulpit Rock.

Pulpit Rock is one of the most famous tourist attractions in Norway. It stands about 1000 feet above the Lysefjord. The Pulpit is a flat section that juts out from the adjacent cliff. It’s square, measuring about 80 feet by 80 feet, and nearly flat.

Getting to it requires rides on a ferry, a train and a bus, followed by a two hour hike up and another two hour hike down.

Jamie took this photo from the base of the vertical cliff that juts up out of Lysefjord. You can’t miss Pulpit rock at the top of this photo. It’s the tiny square section of rock jutting out just right of center. This photo from a thousand feet away is as close as we got.

A couple years ago Jamie was skipping with the kids at school when she felt an incredible pain in her left leg. As Vin Scully would say, “She went down like she got shot.” The doctor told her that she should take it easy because she had pulled a muscle. Jamie’s tougher than she looks. The pain persisted so a year later she went to another doctor who suspected that she had a blood clot. When an ultrasound showed she didn’t, he told her to take a yoga class and stretch it out.

We have a good friend (Hi, Jan) who damn near died after getting a blood clot in her leg while flying. That thought nagged at Jamie and she worried about having the same problem on this trip so she went to our family doctor. He had an MRI done and called that night to tell her that her Achilles’ tendon was 2/3 torn and that she needed to see an orthopedic surgeon immediately.

There must be a lot of people with orthopedic problems in San Luis Obispo, because she couldn’t get an appointment with any of them. Eventually one doctor’s front office person said, “Call us early every morning in case we have a cancellation.”

A week or so later she was able to see an outstanding doctor. He looked at the same MRI and said, “Nothing wrong here. Just an old injury that’s healed and left lots of scar tissue. Get some physical therapy.”

“But I’m leaving on a trip around the world next week.”

“In that case, be careful. Don’t do anything too strenuous. You’ll be fine.”

That explains why we’re not hiking up to Pulpit Rock. And since I’m openly terrified of heights, I completely agree with the doctor’s diagnosis.

Back at my first job in advertising I worked with a copywriter who handled the Van De Kamp Bakery account. Every week she had to write descriptive copy that made a number of different bakery items sound delicious.

After a couple months of this she had run out of new ways to describe something as flaky and tasty. So she resorted to repeated use of the onomonopia “Mmm”. She was very particular about the number of m’s in Mmm. It had to be exactly three. Not two. Not four. Three and three only. One week she got in a huge, screaming argument with the art director because he added a fourth m in order to make a line of copy look more balanced. She went crazy, screaming, “There are only three m’s in Mmm.”

Well, if that copywriter were here in Stavanger, she might be tempted to make it Mmmmmmm.

Check out the item in the photo above: There simply aren’t enough m’s to adequately describe caviar in a toothpaste tube. I’m not a fan of caviar’s taste nor texture, but I know that devotees are willing to pay small fortunes for Beluga caviar. I just looked it up. The going rate is $200-300 per ounce.

This, obviously, is not Beluga. How do I know? Because it costs $1.30 per tube.

Caviar in a tube, however, is not the oddest culinary delight to be found in Norway. That honor goes to a restaurant we saw advertised in Bergen. The ad touted the fact that the restaurant was, and I quote, “Located next to the leprosy museum.”

Mmmmmmmm.

It’s not easy to get from Bergen to Stavanger. Google says it’s only 129 miles, but also says the trip takes 4 hours and 5 minutes by car. I can only assume the road twists and turns enough to make a strong man car sick.

Instead of driving, we took the Speed Ferry. It’s a sleek-looking boat whose appearance befits its name. It’s big, probably seating a couple hundred people. One would expect speed from something with this aerodynamic design, yet it somehow manages to cover the same 129 miles from Bergen to Stavanger in 4 hours and 30 minutes. If math is not your strong suit, that’s 25 minutes more than it takes to drive the same distance by car.

Deceptive name aside, the trip is spectacular. We cruised through a stunning series of inlets and islands and fiords. We made quick stops in half a dozen seaside towns we’d never heard of, but would like to visit now that we’ve seen them.

The photo above is a town named Haugesund. Just another unknown but unbelievably beautiful stop along the route of the Speed Ferry.

When you stroll the streets of Bergen, you get the sense that the Miss Universe pageant is being held nearby and that all the contestants were just turned loose on a break.

I’ve never seen more beauty in one place in my life except when I walk into a room and see Jamie all by herself. Even she said it’s remarkable.

The men, on the other hand, all look like Vikings or trolls. Or both.

Hey, wait just a gol’ dang minute. I think I’ve heard some of you guys say the same thing about Jamie and me.