Can there be anything better than ice cream around the world? Yes: ice cream with friends.
The Travelin’ Trio met Lisa and Stan on our 2024 Rick Steves Tour of Central Europe. We became the Alpine Amigos and in 2025 went on Rick Steve’s’ tour of the Alps. Finding good travel companions is rare, but we do it well and so we went on this Baltic cruise together. Does that make us Baltic Buddies?
One of the things that makes us good travel companions is that we all love ice cream. I think Lisa and I are tied for most vocal about our ice cream passion, but Stan may quietly be the most eager to consume it.
In Oslo’s waterfront there are a lot of pop-up stands with food and souvenirs. The area seems to be as popular with locals as it is with tourists. There were several food stands with ice cream. We picked the one with the longest line, Hennig Olsen. We later found out this family-owned company is the oldest ice cream producer in Norway.
It turns out, we aren’t the only ones who love our ice cream. “Norwegians love ice cream; there’s no doubt about that. Norway is among the top-three countries in the world when it comes to ice cream consumption, with each Norwegian person eating on average 12 litres of ice cream per year. A huge amount of the ice cream enjoyed by Norwegians and visitors to Norway alike comes from one place: the Hennig-Olsen ice cream factory in Kristiansand, Norway.”
There were lots of flavors to choose from, all with Norwegian names. I could often tell what the ingredients were from the picture and sometimes I used Google Translate. I asked the server about different flavors and she translated in broken English enough that I could figure it out. The one called “Rosso” looked particularly intriguing, but when I asked about it, all she could say was “Red.” Well I could tell it was red, but which red flavor was in there. After a lot of Internet searching, I finally found the company’s Norwegian site and translated the text to find out the ”Red” flavor was a combination of raspberry and currant.
My choice of deliciously creamy flavors with no artificial anything in them was:
• Top scoop: “Rosso”—vanilla ice cream with raspberry and currant sorbet
• Bottom scoop: strawberry ice cream with strawberry jam