London -> Tromsø (16/02/2019)
I’m hoping this is a brief blog to compose. After a late night babysitting it was some last minute packing the Saturday morning. Katherine has done 99% of the work and I just got in her way for the remaining 1%.
Truffle Pig was very confused by the whole ordeal – there was lots of packing going on and yet her harness wasn’t on. We dropped her round to Jack, her dog walker / dog sitter for her mini holiday with hopes that Clare and Martin would pick up the beast Sunday evening for a proper holiday. Their flat is a treasure trove of artefacts with smells and objects to drive the senses wild. Let’s hope none of them are eaten or chewed during the vacance.
We got stuck in horrendous traffic on the A3 and M25, but made it to Gatwick with enough time to enjoy some Wagamama’s. A long wait on the runway for our flight to get the all clear, then we were off on our adventure.
The changing colours of the clouds and sky was indescribable with all the colours of the rainbow being visible with vibrant reds shining with the setting sun.
We circled Tromsø airport as the ground crew gave the runway another brush for our landing and were beaten to our landing spot by another plane. Thus, we had to sit in the plane waiting for them to clear immigration before we could disembark.
A painful long queue (notice lots of waiting today) with people holding non-eu passports going in to both lanes and holding everyone up. It didn’t really matter as the baggage carousel had broken between the two flights and we waited for staff to ferry luggage through to us.
We had at this point missed our planned bus and jaunted down to the local bus stop in hopes that it would get us in to town. One of the most useless bus maps in the world showed an accurate scale of the island and we figured #42 would get us close to where we needed to go. Our trust was rewarded and we jumped off about 5mins walk away from our hotel.
Self check-in, more layers and a brief walk to the corner of the building where ‘Da Pinocchio’ promised warm food without the worry of traversing the streets late at night. For reference: the translation on a menu to “squash” means “courgettes”. So Katherine enjoyed some prawn and courgette pasta while I had a pizza. We would later learn that pizza is probably the staple food group of the northern region of Norway.
We had a nice leisurely walk around town, finding our meeting point for the morning and enjoying the bit of snow that covered the area. No sign or hope of the Aurora tonight.
Saturday, 16th February 2019
Trans Travels 