3. Where to go in Western Europe: Scandinavia: Denmark and Norway

There's a dear Finnish friend of mine, BootsnAll writer Carita Groundstroem, who just had to pick these next couple of months to move from Helsinki to Los Angeles. Figures.

See, my hope was we'd get to see each other (it's been a few years; we met in Scotland when we were studying there in 1999). I'd also hoped to clink a few glasses of “the black stuff” with her.
Black stuff is a dark, licorice-tasting very smooth booze from Finland. Carita used to smuggle over loads of it to Edinburgh. It’s like drinking candy, that, as if someone took black licorice jelly beans, liquefied them and let them ferment. Black stuff also has a proper Finnish name, by the way, but I can’t remember it, and we just always called it “the black stuff.” Oh well—there’ll be other opportunities to hang with Carita (hell, I suppose I’d see LA sooner or later).
But I digress.
From Northern Germany I head into Denmark, only I’m not sure yet how I’ll head further north. Two ideas come to mind, both involving heading straight north to Hirtshals:
1. Ferry to Kristiansand, Norway, and train through the interior to Oslo.
2. Ferry straight to Oslo, and start making my way to Sweden.
But I’m also not really sure of how much of Norway I’ll do. There is the notorious expense factor, but then Philip Blazdell tells plenty of reasons to give Oslo and Norway a pretty solid chunk of time.
For the moment, I’ll just have to put this into the “Who knows?” file.