Saturday evening we rented our bikes and scooted around Stavanger for awhile before retiring. The next morning we got up for church. We once again worked on the blog and got ready for church. We rode our bikes to church. I thought, this is what it feels to be a Mormon missionary who rides bikes everywhere.
| June 2015 Norway Trip |
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| Click on the date to see the post |
The feeling of being in a place where you know your ancestors walked is amazing. Though this church was built after my grandmother was there, it was still the city she learned about the gospel and was baptized. They were barraged by so much religious persecution that many of the people who joined the Mormon Church in Norway before WWII emigrated to the US. In one of the journal entries it said that they lost friends because of their conversion. It had to be a very difficult decision. This is an excerpt from the Torgersen book again about my great grandmother Hannah Marthea Haaversdatter Torgersen: “She immigrated to America to be with her children in Ohio. My grandmother had no knowledge of the English language and never learned it. It took great courage for her to make the trip”.
Stavanger ward is a nice size congregation and very international. We met some families from the US, Kenya, Brazil and of course Norwegians. They had a temple trip that weekend so we were told that many of their ward members were still traveling home from Stockholm Sweden, a 16 hour drive. It was so fantastic to be in the place my family attended church. My grandfather had served his mission there and so had my cousin Neal. The services were translated and those of us who didn’t speak Norwegian listened to the translation through headphones. After the block of meetings they had a potluck lunch. We had pizza, Rice from Iran, potatoes and other really yummy food.
We went back to our apartment and changed went for a bike ride along the coast. it was fun to ride there. I may have said this in an earlier post, but Norway has great bike trails. They ride bikes a lot for their transportation. We saw a family of swans and more boats in more marinas. It’s fun to ride bikes. It’s one thing our family has always enjoyed doing together.
Wherever we went in Norway, there were either waterways or mountains or both to orient ourselves on, so it was hard to get lost. It’s not the same in Minnesota, where the lack of mountains, and even hills, and the irregularity of the waterways makes intuitive navigation a bit more difficult. In Minnesota you need to know the relative position of the sun in each season to use it as a directional guide. Though we encountered rain every day we were in Norway, it really never became an obstacle for us because the weather was mostly dry, and often sunny each day we went out.
As we mentioned before, one of the remarkable things we noticed over and over again in Norway was the resourcefulness, artistry and hard work of the people. 
Even the manhole covers in Norway are beautifully designed and engineered.
The view from our apartment in Stavanger was expansive as we were on the 16th floor of the tallest building in the neighborhood. We could see for miles and miles. Gloria, our host, was away so we had the whole place to ourselves. It was a great place and a very comfortable situation for us.
We returned the bikes went back to our apartment and settled down for the night. We left for Oslo the next morning very early.