Chilling Up North
Nearly three years ago, I went to Iceland to celebrate my mother’s 60th birthday. The entire family was there, in fact, and one of our primary goals was to hunt the northern lights. Unfortunately, due to tempestuous circumstances and all-around uncooperative weather, our quest was unsuccessful.
This year, to save me from tears, I’m trying the ol’ trip-in-the-north once again, and this time, I won’t rest until I see them! Fortunately, I’ve got a daring partner to join me in this adventure once again: Larissa, whom I met in Lyon, and who was equally as excited to see them! You see, Larissa lived in New Zealand for 2 years and never saw the Aurora Australis, and neither had she seen the Borealis when she vacationed in Iceland (just like me!)
Anyways, we figured we’d combine both of our Christmas vacations with an epic adventure in the Land of Always Winter, by visiting Santa’s courtyard in Norway!
The trip immediately started with me losing my brand-new merino wool neckwarmer through airport security, and having to run back to the gate in a flurry. But hey! The airport wished me Merry Christmas via its classic “We please ask ALL of the passengers of the flight to Frankfurt to present themselves at the gate, as it is CLOSING”. A personalized message for me? Awww, Geneva Airport, you didn’t have to… Merry Christmas to you too!
But of course, the flight was delayed… so all of that running was for naught. Due to this delay, we had to run across Frankfurt airport lest we lose our connection to Oslo. In any case, now having boarded the second plane sweaty once again, we sat down and calmed down, relieved that we could now doze off.
Until we heard a loud metallic groan coming from the engines…
After a stressful and sweaty flights to Frankfurt, we heard the captain issue the following statement:
Hello folks, this is your captain speaking… I seem to have broken… cough, I mean, there seems to be a broken rod near the engine out of complete coincidence, and we’ll need to replace one of the wheels before get moving. So… this will likely take one hour. Thankfully, we will allow you to remain inside the aircraft.
Oh, thank god, we’re allowed to stay within the aircraft! Awesome! I love this little emotional back-and-forth between DEFCON Red and Sloth-chasing-a-snail.
Anyways, we eventually arrived in Oslo around 1AM, where Larissa ingeniously booked us a hotel right next to the airport. I love it when a plan comes together!
We woke up, and took our final flight to our final destination: Tromso (actually, it’s Tromsø, but pardon my unwillingness to copy-paste the “ø” from Wikipedia every time). Tromso is one of the northernmost cities in the world, and is located above the polar circle. This means near-perpetual darkness, as can be seen by these gorgeous midday shots from the city center:
It is uncanny how weird it is to have complete darkness by 2PM, and feel like cuddling near a warm fire by 4PM, but this is exactly what we did. We found our way to our cozy Airbnb, turned on the TV and Fred Claus had just began its run, which meant, you guessed it: Christmas movies! We watched Vince Vaughn blab his way through our cold hearts and fell asleep until 6PM…
As I’m writing this, we are binging classic movies while eating some reindeer salami. We finished Love Actually and are currently watching Dennis Quaid punch climate change in the face in The Day After Tomorrow. Everything is closed and we can’t do much in town since everyone is essentially doing the same thing as us… so… God Jul!