@Master Bates & In Motion:
I don't know about Norway (though I know you have a fairly hight c ost of living), but I have to kind of agree with Master Bates. I live in Germany and when I think about it it's ridiculous, everything in Europe is basically a plane trip of 1-3 hours away. I often find myself asking why I can't get any friends to travel with me for say a weekend trip or 5 days or so when there are so many interesting places close by.
Plus these days you have those cheap airlines (which arent cheap, because they're dangerous - AirBerlin for example is one of the safest in the world..and you dont really need great service on a 1-2 hour plane trip) and regular airlines offering cheap flights for like 100 bucks back and forth (only if you book early enough, of course!), which make travelling here within Europe pretty easy.
I've often caught myself thinking how Europe is sort of the size of the US and travelling to different states within the US is basically like travelling to different nations in Europe..though we have a little disadvantage that people speak different languages everywhere!
I plan on going to Amsterdam (friend is moving there), Stockholm and southern France during this and next summer and all of it will be really affordable travel and not take a lot of time..I really think effort/money wise it's very comparable to a US citizen travelling within the US.
No offense, though, In Motion, I guess it might be a bit different in Norway as thats a bit further from most places (being in the north). Do you guys have access to affordable flights such as RyanAir, AirBerlin or other affordable ones, too, or is Norway not well-connected to that network, yet? just curious
....that just reminded me of the people in Germany, who've been to southern Florida or southern California and then rave about how great the weather is in the USA (assuming all of the US has weather like south beach).
I haven't done that much travelling myself, yet, but the one funny thing Ive realized is that...people from Europe wanna go to the US/Australia/etc. and couldn't care less about the great places that are like an hour or two away from them..whereas people in the US and OZ wanna come to Europe so badly. Not true for everyone, but for many people I know..guess it's just less exotic and thus interesting if something is closeby