We arrived for our 2 week layover in Frankfort, but we never went to any of the places we'd planned. Instead we ate and drank and took pictures in Frankfort. The snow didn't stop and it was really cold after living in Louisiana and Dakar.
The beer there was so good I think I must have been a bit tipsy sometimes. We took slow motion traffic photos out the hotel room windows. We went to a beer garden and ordered our beers 4 at a time because it was so crowded. We met some American soldiers and played some poker in a lobby of a hotel none of us was staying in. We ran into Denise (the diver's wife from across the street in Dakar) and went drinking and I remember singing the Jewish national anthem with some Germans...that's how far away from anti-semitism Germany is today. We visited a music beer garden and saw the first record player that was like a huge windup music box... with metal keys bending to make notes. We went out but the weather was cold and snowy and the hotel was not as cozy after a week, as it was at first. It was fun and interesting, but we were ready to move on.
We called 2 weeks early to see if we could go ahead to visit Copenhagen in Denmark. When he called to see when we needed to be there, Bob said the rig had arrived early so we headed to our final destination in Stavanger, Norway. The last leg of the trip was a long snowy bus ride from Copenhagen and we arrived in the middle of the night. The taxi driver took us to 3 different hotels before we found one with a vacancy and finally settled for the night.
When we woke up it was April 1st in 1968 and it was snowing. Then the sun came out and it was a beautiful day. It snowed every morning and every night. And the sun came up at 2 in the morning and went down at 3 in the afternoon. Bob and his coworkers sat in the bars until they closed at midnight and his bedtime was usually right before sunrise. Then Eva woke up with the sun. It took me awhile to get used to the darkness and the cold and lack of sleep.
We had a Norwegian real estate agent who showed us houses all that day and the next and the next until Bob chose one and we had a bed of our own to sleep in that night. It was the downstairs of a 2 story house with a basement. The house owners had to go either up or down a staircase to get to where they lived. There was a laundry in the basement. Our floor had no stairs. We had a big livingroom and a bedroom and kitchen and bath. There was a big dining table on the back wall of the livingroom making an almost separate dining room because the back of the sofa blocked it from the livingroom. The kitchen was tiny but complete with dishes. Perfect for the 3 of us!
There was a baby bed. I reckon that's why Bob chose that house, but the bed was just a raised platform almost like a changing table with barely any sides and it was across the foot of the foot of the bed. Eva always slept in her own bed, and was fine there. I worried she would fall but she never did. There were raised wooden pieces across the bottoms of the doorways though, and she often fell out of her walker trying to go into another room so I put her walker away and she learned to walk. She would go around and around in the livingroom so long as there was something she could pull herself up on and hang onto. She "could" walk ling before she actually walked. She would take a step then toss herself down on her diapered butt as if she was learning to fall without hurting herself. She never crawled, but she always managed to get where she wanted to go.
I have lots of memories from Norway. We bought a car ... a v.w. bug. It wasn't new or fast, and we parked it facing down our hill so when the cold would keep it from starting we could just push it to get it rolling then pop the clutch. More memories of Norway include the fact that the house was heated by pipes all along the outside walls of the livingroom. The girl from upstairs spoke some English and understood more. She was the daughter of the landlord and a single mother of two. She told me that all the houses were heated like that with pipes that held heating element wires because hydro electric power was supplied by the government.
Eva and I went walking and discovered on the back side of our block was a little park. Little girls playing at the park rushed over to chatter to Eva. She was a hit the whole time we lived there. The girls, about 8 years old, told me they all took English required in their school. They were always asking me about a word for something and I asked them about Norwegian words about as often. As soon as they got home from school, 2-3 of them would come knocking on my door to tell me "passa bebe" which meant I needed to bundle Eva up and get her ready to go out in her stroller to go play in the park. When she had her 1st birthday (June 8, 1968) four of those girls came to a "party" dressed in their national costumes and sang to Eva and ate cake and ice cream.
I used corn starch (better than baby powder!) to prevent diaper rash and when I ran out no one knew what I wanted until finally I showed a picture of corn to the shopkeeper and she realized I was looking for something from "maize" and tried canned corn, cornmeal and finally corn starch, called what sounded like "mice mell".
At Easter in Norway, Stavanger came to a complete halt everywhere. I didn't know what was going on but the stores were all closed and I needed milk. I saw one of the little girls from the park and she explained that everyone took vacation between Palm Sunday and Easter and went to the mountains to ski one last time before spring thaw. I told her I needed milk and she talked to her mom then led me down the street to a house that had a little store in it's downstairs entryway. The storekeeper, when she came out was old white headed and wrinkled and had a mole on her chin with so much hair growing from it that she resembled a billy goat. It startled me! The stuff fairy tales talk about! But, she had milk for Eva. I bought both her quarts plus a can of "steri-vita" which was powdered milk that tasted like canned evaporated milk, but Eva drank it and I made it through the week.
Callie and Gary and Sissy and Ronnie lived in Stavanger. It was at a dead end of the street that was called "Blindveg". I lived on Haverfjiordgarten street. We visited and went sight seeing often to the shops in the town and the flower market and the fish market. The "vinminopolet" sold alcoholic beverages that were given a quota so you coul only buy 2 bottles a week. No stocking the bar!
Once Callie and her kids and the girl from upstairs toured an American navy ship and I invited the sailors who gave us a tour to come visit us. That night 8 of them did and we played cards and dice games and listened to their stories about where they were from and about how they missed their families. As usual, Eva was a hit and was passed around to the ones who loved babies and Sissy and Ronnie had fun, too with the sailors. They brought chips and dips and frozen pizza and ice cream from their ship and gave us cartons of cigarettes. Bob was kinda mad that we had done that when I told him, but he smoked the cigarettes and drank the beer they left.
Bob had a hard time with the law in Norway and got tickets for speeding and parking in the wrong place and going the wrong way down a one way street. The last ticket he got was for drinking and driving which in Norway is an automatic jail term. When he told his boss, he was immediately fired and given his final paycheck and his tickets home. His boss, though, sent him across the hallway to a different Offshore Drilling Company who hired him on the spot. When we went to tell the Blackorby family goodbye, Gary and Callie offered to keep Eva for a few days until we could get a place to stay. So Eva stayed there and Bob and I shipped our goods to the office in Great Yarmouth and cashed in our airline tickets and bought tickets to London.
