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Day 21 part 2. Train to Oslo and some sightseeing.

Onwards and upwards, through a town that surprised us completely. We'd expected to find just another large northern European city, commercial brash and noisy. Instead we found a delightful easy going place, in a beautiful setting at the end of the Oslofjorden. It reminded us of Amsterdam without the sleeze or a more cosmopolitan Utrecht. What was also surprising was the spacious feel of the city area so close to the harbour. There seemed to be no area like the 'Gamelebyen' of other towns.

Cycling further we came to the palace and had a bit of a mooch around, before taking the road to the right of the palace past some university buildings. We cycled slowly in a lazy slightly lost way and stopped just to make sure we were heading the right was in a wide tree-lined boulevade.

A lady stopped to ask us if we were lost, so we checked that we were heading the right way to get to the park. We also commented how lovely this area was, to which she proudly said that it was one of the most popular areas to live in.

We found the large iron gates of the Frognerpark, and looked through to see a long wide road leading up to the monolith. We wandered in with out bikes, it seemed as if cycling was allowed in the park so rather than locking them up we took them with us. After a few hundred metres we saw a cafe with a terras and decided to take some refreshments. The view was lovely looking out over lots of rose bushes and the bridge that runs up to the monolith. The sun was wonderful.....did I mention it was sunny? Suitably recharged we wandered further across the bridge towards the monolith.

I am sure that every guidebook about Oslo has enough detail about the park, so I won't try to reproduce it here, except for two interesting facts.
1) all the statues in the park are the work of one man Gustav Vigeland (who seems to have been a prolific and talented chap)
2) the monolith is carved from a single piece of stone.

Here are some of our pictures of the park, some of them are biggish so may take a while to load. Enjoy. We did.

On the way down we went off to the right of the park (when viewed from the front gates) and cycled through the grassy tree-lined area. There we found a recycling point for single use barbeques. We had not seen that anywhere else before and have not since. On the way out we hit the giftshop had a look through some books and bought some postcards.

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