Saturday Aug 19, 2023
Hi Folks! Well we are now officially off of our cruise and fending for ourselves! What, no one to serve us meals and entertain us?? SPOILED! Lol.
We docked at Longyearbyen around 7 AM and they offered a tender at 9 AM to go in to town to shop or walk around. Carol and Kathy headed in and Dan and I relaxed on the ship. Their tender got them back to the ship at 11 AM and then a bus took us to the airport at 11:30 AM.
Our charter flight for everyone on the ship wasn’t leaving until 2:35 PM so we figured we had lots of time. NOT! The ship somehow messed up the list of passengers that were supposed to fly to Oslo so it took us over 2 hours to check our bags and get thru security. The girl at check in said if the ship had given them the right list, it should have only taken 30 minutes! Oh well. We made it safely to Oslo.
We got our luggage and set off trying to find the luggage storage area since we decided we’d leave our big luggage at the airport and only take our carry on bags for the 4 days we’ll be tooling around Norway. Well the luggage storage area was deep in the basement of the airport and we finally found it. But then it looked like no luggage compartments were available but it was our lucky day and we got the last one! YAY!
We then set out to find the train to take us downtown. Luckily the Oslo airport is well marked in English and we found where we needed to buy tickets. It also didn’t hurt that I had found a You Tube video online showing step by step instructions to get there!
We got our tickets at the machine (thank goodness for the “English” button!) and we only had 10 minutes to wait for the next train. The trains are very clean and comfortable. We were in downtown Oslo but around 8:15 PM and our hotel was only a 5 minute walk from the train station. That’s good because our train tomorrow leaves at 6:30 AM!
Tomorrow we’ll be doing a partial version of the “Norway in a Nutshell” tour. The main part of it is called the Flam Railway and it’s supposed to be one of the top train rides in the world. It will take us from Oslo to the town of Flam which is nestled in the fjords of Norway. Should be fun. More to come in tomorrow’s blog!
PS: Since today was a travel day I don’t have many pictures to share. Should have lots more tomorrow!
The Wandering Italian 