My Perfect Vacation
How ten days in Norway made me reconsider my feelings about travel
A few months back I delineated all the ways and reasons I loathe traveling. I am still not a huge fan of travel – but I did recently take one of my all-time best trips: an inspiring and relaxing eleven-day vacation in Norway.
Why Norway? The number-one draw for me was Edvard Munch, with whom I am somewhat obsessed. I will talk more about Munch in an upcoming essay – after I have the chance to see the current Munch exhibition of outdoor scenes, Trembling Earth, running at The Clark in Williamstown, Mass., through mid-October 2023 -- but suffice to say that I wanted to visit the Munch Museum in Oslo, which as its name indicates, is wholly devoted to the life and work of the unique artist who dragged nineteenth century painting kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. I wanted to see everything at the Munch Museum as well as works of his that are spread around at a number of other venues in Oslo – at the National Museum and the city university -- and in a modern art museum in the city of Bergen in western Norway. And I wanted to see the landscapes and urban settings that inspired Munch, as well as walk the streets he once walked (and once painted) and, yes, even to sit and drink coffee at the historic Grand Café where he held court with a coterie of other artists and self-styled Bohemians. I accidentally wound up standing in a hillside park where Munch supposedly heard a thunderous roar of nature, which led him to cover his ears and inspired his best-known painting, The Scream. I could go on and on about Munch, and I will, but suffice it to say that there was a strong element of pilgrimage at the heart of my trip.
That was enough reason right there to make me want to endure the indignities of travel. As it turned out, Munch’s work is incredibly accessible in Norway. Even The Scream – the quintessential Munch painting that has come to be synonymous with the artist and one of the most iconic images of the last century-plus, in many ways because it captures so many aspects of the anxieties of modern life -- was just one of a series of paintings hung on a museum wall that, when we visited, you could walk right up to and stand in front of and be the only person there and not have to battle a crowd of onlookers holding up their smartphones to take photos of one of the most ubiquitous images in human history. While there was a guard in the room where The Scream was hung, the painting was not behind bullet-proof glass nor was it cordoned off by ropes to keep admirers from getting too close to it – or to steal or deface it, as has happened with several of the versions of The Scream that Munch painted. (Munch painted multiple versions of many of his best-known works, sometimes to have his own copy after selling the original, other times because over the years he felt the original painting was not completed to his satisfaction or that it could be improved upon with some subtle or not-so-subtle alterations.)
But again, this is not an essay on Munch. Having travelled all the way to Norway, we (my wife and traveling companion who accompanied me and indulged me deliciously on this journey) could not very well not travel outside of Oslo and miss views of the countryside and, in particular, the fjords. After a week in Oslo -- which included a night at the brand-new, spectacular Oslo Opera House to see the Norwegian Opera and Ballet’s contemporary rendering of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte (staged in an Ikea warehouse) -- we took a scenic railway trip to central Norway, where we stayed overnight in a small village that serves as the launching point for short (or long, take your pick) cruises up a fjord. We opted for a two-hour “cruise” (it was really just a ferry ride, albeit a quite comfortable one), and it was truly spectacular. Photographs and films of the fjords cannot and do not fully capture what it is like to see them and be on them and especially to experience them in relationship to their immediate surroundings – steep hills or small mountains, some snowcapped, most not, many with waterfalls of varying shapes and sizes. But it was the relative quiet (the ferry was electric-powered so there was no noise and no gas fumes) contrasting with the awesome nature of the hills – mostly wooded, a few barren outposts of rock like something you would expect to see on the Moon or on Mars – that you had to experience first-hand. And as the boat cruised up the curvy path carved out by the ancient glaciers that in their current incarnation are the river-like fjord, we would pass by one mountain only to have another one (and another one, and another one) enter our field of vision, such that the mountains themselves seemed to move past us and past each other. Every moment the scenery changed; the dimensionality was vivid and striking. Munch reflected this visual dynamic in so many of his paintings where skies and clouds and scenery is represented by swirling lines.
After two hours or so, we disembarked in another small village where buses were waiting to transport us through the gorgeous countryside to another rail station, where we would pick back up on the scenic route all the way to Bergen. On this leg of travel we passed by a frozen tundra that apparently served as a film location for the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back. That little fact did not excite me as much as the idea that director Irvin Kershner was as crazy as Werner Herzog was when the latter shot a crew of laborer-actors transporting a 320-ton steamship up and over a hill in his visionary film Fitzcarraldo. (No, I have no plans to travel to Peru to visit the site of this feat, which came at the expense of numerous injuries and several deaths.) The journey was magnificent, but we were happy when we arrived at the classic old train station in the picturesque small city of Bergen -- and learned that our hotel for the next three nights was right around the corner.
So besides Munch and the journey across the heart of Norway and the spectacular scenery, what made the Norway trip so comfortable and relaxing?
First of all, sheer luck brought us twelve days of perfect weather. Not a drop of rain fell on us while we were there, the sun shone every day (and well into the night), and the temperatures were perfect, ranging from upper 50s to low 70s. Maybe that sounds a little cool to you, but my comfort level maxes out at 75 degrees, especially when there is humidity, of which there was none the entire time. So the weather was never an obstacle to anything we wanted to do or anywhere we wanted to go. You couldn’t plan for that. Or you could, but you know what they say about plans.
Secondly, and this is in the realm of the highly personal, I have a problem with my right foot. You don’t need to know the details, but I had minor foot surgery about four years ago. While the surgery was successful, I still am subject to foot pain, especially if my shoes don’t fit right or if I do a lot of walking. The thing is, one of the things my wife and I like best about visiting a new city is to get out and amble the streets, often with no agenda, no purpose, no destination in mind. Over the years we have stumbled upon so many surprising places by taking this approach, be they cafes, restaurants, shops, plazas, outdoor art, beautiful parts of town, and sites of interest.
Since the time my foot went bad (sometime in 2018) and even after the surgery in 2019, this has greatly hindered my enjoyment of visiting other places, especially cities, where it is not unheard of to walk six or seven miles a day. On a trip late last year, my foot and footwear conspired against me and rendered me almost unable to walk without severe pain – it came close to totally ruining what should have been an otherwise lovely vacation (the fact that it was cold and rainy the whole time did not help). This time out, I went back and visited my foot surgeon a week before our departure and asked for a cortisone shot in the offending joint. My doctor complied with my request, and it was as simple as that. I made sure I was wearing the best possible shoes for comfort and support and, given the boost of the cortisone shot, pain in the joint was no issue. This especially came in handy when we found ourselves accidentally walking down a steep, three-mile winding path down a mountain in Bergen (we had ascended in a funicular and intended to return to the base the same way, but our feet got the better of us and took us deeper and deeper down the path). My feet were fine the whole way; my quads sure got an extreme workout, however, and the next two mornings I could barely stand up straight until my leg muscles had a chance to stretch out gently and fully. It was the good kind of pain and discomfort, though, the kind you get from a particularly vigorous gym workout (not that I would know). And because my daughter is a dancer, I knew the best thing to do was to keep moving. As she puts it, and as apparently all dancers and dance teachers remind each other, “motion is lotion.”
Other than seeing as much Munch as possible and strategically criss-crossing the country to get a sense of its natural beauty and varied terrain, we made a point of not cramming in too many planned activities, to allow for maximum time for making organic discoveries and to default to hours of relaxation, whether that meant to sit on a bench on a riverside dock, to wander through a palace garden and soak in the forest-bathing, or just to enjoy downtime or napping back at our hotel. I require that downtime nearly every afternoon (whether or not I am traveling). My wife, on the other hand, does not, and we went knowing that there would be times when I would retreat to our hotel room when she would continue flaneuring. We would meet back up as it got close to dinner time, and given the time of year, when we would leave a restaurant at 8pm, 9pm or later, it would still be broad daylight outside – an unusual but not welcome sensation.
On our final afternoon in Bergen, sitting at a lovely sidewalk café with views of the city’s version of a central park, I remarked to my companion that I was so utterly relaxed I had no real desire or eagerness or excitement about heading home over the course of the next twenty-four hours. Typically, even on a weeklong or weekslong trip, I begin to feel the tug of home after three or four days, and by the time departure day comes around I’m at the airport with hours to spare because I cannot wait to get home. This time out, I never had that feeling the entire time. I may have very occasionally thought about the work that awaited me when I returned, the various things to which I would need to attend in the first few weeks back (of which I am still in the thick), but those were just fleeting thoughts and feelings. It is not that I wanted to move to Norway – although as potential refuges go, this one is surely at or near the top of my list – but it was just that Norway, with the addition of a lot of planning and incorporation of lessons learned about what works and does not work for me while traveling, provided me with the most relaxing, easygoing vacation of all time.
And now that I am at home, I have brought a lot of that feeling back with me. My greatest challenge now is setting that feeling aside so I can plunge back into the life and work and responsibilities that I am faced with – that we are all faced with – every day.
Then again, maybe not. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned about integrating aspects of the vacation-like mindset into everyday life. Whether or not I want to learn it or integrate it, it’s really got a hold on me.
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