The theme of this post and trip will not only follow our adventure and trip through parts of Norway but will also highlight the fact that I’m pregnant and things just aren't the same as they used to be for me and my body. With that said, enjoy reading as much as we enjoyed our trip, I hope I can convey into words what the majestic country of Norway offered us while there.
We flew out of London Gatwick airport on Thursday evening. London has several airports, Heathrow being the most popular and one that most have heard of. We've flown out of Stansted for our previous trips but found tickets through Norwegian Air that left and returned to Gatwick, which according to Googlemaps is about a 2 hour drive from our house. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 2040, so I picked Aaron up from work at 1600 and we started towards London, not sure what traffic would be like. It had been raining and thunder-storming for most of the day and I briefly wondered if it would affect our flight but then I concluded that it rains often enough in England, a little rain shouldn't affect things, right? Our cigarette lighter in the car stopped working weeks ago, which means we were no longer able to light up in the car. No, we use the lighter to plug our GPS into, but our radio had a USB port so we were able to use that and didn't bother looking into replacing the fuse for the cigarette lighter. Until the USB port stopped working not too long ago. So we had a GPS that had battery life of about 2 hours. I had printed off directions (Mapquest, remember that website kids?) to follow versus using the GPS, so we could conserve battery life for our return journey home. PS The Brits call a GPS, a sat nav. Fun fact. So anyways, I would occasionally switch the GPS on to make sure we were going the right way. We hit traffic with more than an hour to go. Horrible traffic that makes one reminisce about DC and 495 and 395 and commutes home from Washington Hospital Center after working a 12 hr night shift or commutes to Inova after not really sleeping during the day and going into work for a 12 hour night shift. I mentioned these memories to Aaron several times during the inch-like pace of London traffic and he said, this is definitely worse. Probably because there was only two lanes at times. We were getting hungry and I was needing a restroom stop. The wonderful thing about pregnancy is your bladder capability goes down to near zero mL tolerance levels. The week of our trip to Norway, I entered the sixth month of pregnancy. I can’t complain, but I will. I’m exhausted most of the time, peeing more than not peeing and beginning to expand beyond just a cute little bump in the belly ... just to name a few. So we stopped briefly to eat and use the restroom and continued onward. We still had plenty of time to get to the airport, we weren't checking bags and I had already checked in for our flight online, so we had our boarding passes and planned on walking directly to our gate to board. While still sitting in traffic, I got a text from Norwegian informing us of a flight delay of about 15 minutes. Not a huge deal. We arrived to the airport, parked and shuttled to the terminal with time to spare. Our flight left as rescheduled around 2100. Norway is 1 hour ahead of London time, so we were scheduled to land in Bergen after midnight, local time. Before pregnancy consumed my body, I was an extremely light sleeper. Now, I can sleep anywhere. I often nap in the middle of the day and sleep better than during the night. So before the plane even took off, my eyes were feeling heavy. Aaron was more than 10 rows back, we had booked our tickets separately to get a cheaper rate. The flight wasn't very full and he could have moved up to sit next to me, but I was already half asleep and figured he might be too, so I enjoyed my aisle seat with an empty seat next to me. While up in the air, I drifted in and out of sleep. I remember thinking to myself, there seems to be more announcements than usual going on over the intercom system, but once again .. pregnant, sleepy and cannot be held accountable for being of sound mind. I woke up to an announcement saying we would land shortly and applause breaking out throughout the plane. I thought, man, these people are more than happy to be in Norway. While waiting for Aaron to get up to my seat to hand me my extremely heavy carry-on of a backpack, he caught up to me and said, “Well that was a close one.” I smiled and nodded, something I often do when I have no idea what is going on. As we exited the plane, he caught me up on what had happened while I was sleeping. The plane was originally scheduled to land in Bergen around 2340 but with the delay it was going to be after midnight. Apparently Bergen airport informed the pilot while we were in the air that the airport was shutting down and would not be able to land our plane due to the airport being closed. So the plane was going to be re-routed to Stavanger which was uh, a 4 hr drive from Bergen. After hearing this, Aaron started to stress, big time. The pilot assured passengers that there would be personnel in Stavanger to arrange hotels, transportation and help with other needs. We had train tickets booked for the following morning, boarding and leaving Bergen’s railway station around 830am! Aaron said they were getting ready to land the plane in Stavanger when the pilot came back on and said they were able to negotiate with the Bergen airport and arranged arrival and touch down for there (hence the applause that woke me up). So the plane flew up the coast and landed in Bergen after all. Looking back, I understand why border patrol in Bergen was extra grumpy while stamping our passports. We caught the bus into downtown Bergen where we had booked a room at Citybox hostel. Our first hostel experience! I guess there should be another theme to this trip as well, Norway is expensive. The krone to dollar is a like 6:1 ratio so I was constantly dividing our costs by six (good for my non-employed brain). While researching hotels for the trip, I couldn't believe how much hotels were. $200-300/night for the more simple rooms. So we decided to brave a hostel that offered a private room with its own bathroom for a little less than the outrageously priced hotel rooms. It was a smart choice after all, because we ended up spending about 6 hours total in the room. We were both exhausted (despite my flight nap) and fell asleep quickly. I was impressed with the room, it was clean and worked for what we needed.
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