Tønsberg + Torstensons

On Saturday, I took the bus down to Tønsberg, where my 4th cousin Ingeborg and her husband live. When I arrived, we ate a light lunch and then went walking around the town. We climbed a hill called "Slottsfjellet" which means "Castle Mountain" where there used to be a Medieval castle, and now there is a small tower. I learned that Tønsberg is the oldest town in Norway and that it was the swedes that burned down the castle that once stood there. We then walked down to the harbor, where there are lots of restaurants and a viking ship that was rebuilt using only tools available to people in the viking age. When we were there, there was also a small viking festival going on, with men dressed in viking attire working on splitting big logs

using big hammers and smaller wedge logs.
When we got back to their home, we talked and ate until around 11, with the conversation ranging from our shared ancestry to Ingeborg's visit to Minnesota in the '70s to American politics.
On Sunday, we drove out to the islands near Tønsberg, which are popular summer destinations for people from Oslo, and walked around the coast of the farthest one, called "The End of the World", where it was just open ocean ahead of us. It was windy and clear and completely beautiful. Before heading home, we ate some cake and drank some coffee in the cafe. Once home, we all spent some time relaxing in their garden under the sun. I read a book that they had about the life of Ingeborg, who is my great-great grandmother who immigrated from Telemark at age 20. The story of her life is fascinating. After leaving Norway and her family at the same age I am now, knowing she would never see any of them again, she arrived in Wisconsin, where she married, had several children and started a farm before her husband died and she moved to Goodhue county to start again. She married again and had more children, broke new soil (on which she, not her husband, was listed as the property holder) and built a new home before watching her second husband drown in

the river. Finally, she moved to Lac qui Parle county, where she married my great-great grandfather, broke ground again and had more children. Even after all the difficulties she faced in the United States, from swarms of locusts, to prairie fires, to winters coming in early October before all of the potatoes were even out of the ground, when asked if she would ever have moved back to Norway, she said something along the lines of "Not even if I owned all of Norway, that is how terrible the difficulties I faced there were."
We then ate a traditional dinner of "Fårikål", which is essentially a sheep and cabbage stew, and was completely delicious. After dinner and dessert, I got on the train heading back to Oslo.
I loved all the conversations we had while I was there, and am looking forward to the plans we are making for me to go to Gvarv with them to see the town where my ancestors lived, and where Ingeborg's family still has farms, as well as them coming to Oslo to have dinner with me and a few more cousins that live here and organizing for me to meet Ingeborg's daughters, who are 25 and 27 years old and living together in an apartment in Oslo.