Adventure of the month

When discussing Norway, there are two things which are invariably mentioned by all who have visited. First is the natural beauty of the fjords and second the exorbitant amount of money the visitor paid for a pizza/ soda/ beer or some other implied gauge as to how expensive this city is. Actually, I think if a highly scientific poll were to be done, the order of those two would probably would have to be reversed. So to address the elephant in the fjords, yes, it is a very vast and beautiful landscape and yes, this allure has caused them all to lose their ever-loving minds when faced with a price gun. My plans for visiting this, my 80th country, were to stay in Oslo for three days and see about a half-dozen museums, preferably without having to resort to selling a kidney or other organ that I may someday want back to pay for it all. That is where the Oslo Card came in very handy. For one price (approximately $68), I had unlimited access to the city's museums and very efficient publ

As hella-cool as the Banksy exhibit was, it still left me with most of the day to roam around the small city of Bristol. This would have been a very fortunate happenstance had there been anything else to see or do in Bristol, or to put it more accurately, anything that I wanted to see or do in Bristol. I, however, had already peaked with the exhibit and was ready to move onward and forward, or to put that more accurately, 13 miles to the east. That is where one finds Bath, an ancient Roman city built up around a series of hot springs. The area around the former public and private baths is so well-preserved, that it has earned the entire city the honor of being named a UNESCO World Heritage City (leading one local woman to comment that now if she wants to as much as open her window, she now needs to get permission from the city council). The majority of visitors through the centuries have come here to partake of the supposedly curative powers of the springs. I had not packed a swimsuit