Fourteen days after my return, I was still halfway to Norway. Many of my work colleagues complained that the holiday had been far too short to recover properly. For me, 5 days in Norway was enough and I was still fully recovered 14 days later and nothing could get me off my feet. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.
But now one thing after the other.
Eva and I planned the trip as a women-only trip without men. At first, 10 days were planned, but unfortunately we had to shorten it to 5 days for Eva’s professional reasons.
We simply rescheduled for 5 days. The travel specialist of the two of us is Eva. She fell in love with Norway, just like me, and has been there several times. I had precise ideas of what I wanted to see and do. Luckily, our ideas coincided. We both wanted to enjoy the midnight sun, she wanted to visit friends, go camping and I wanted to play golf with the midnight sun. Eva went all out and planned everything, flights, car hire, accommodation and even some excursions. It was a packed schedule, but I liked it.
She planned to fly with SAS rather than Swiss, as they had announced that they would be cancelling a large number of flights due to staff shortages. Who knew that the SAS pilots would go on strike the day before our departure. But that’s how it happened. On Monday, 04.07.2022, all flights were cancelled. We phoned, wrote Whatsapp and then met on Monday at around 8pm for an emergency meeting. What should we do? Cancel everything and postpone it until later or just try to rebook everything. We looked for flights until late in the evening.
We were able to change the flight from Zurich to Oslo to the Swiss flight at 8.50 pm. We would be in Oslo later, but at least we would be in Oslo already.
The domestic flight from Oslo to Evenes was more difficult. We found what we were looking for with Norwegian Air. But when we finally completed the registration, all seats were already booked, except for the evening flight. After a lot of back and forth, we decided to sleep on it and decide on Tuesday morning. It turned out that we had both slept badly. While Eva was of the opinion to postpone everything, I wanted to try everything. That’s when my incorrigible optimism prevailed. On Tuesday morning, I looked at the Norwegian App in a sleepy stupor and was suddenly wide awake. There were still 2 seats free on the midday flight. I quickly called Eva, probably got her out of bed too, and asked her if I should finish booking them. She ran to her PC in no time at all and said, “Wait until I’ve finished booking, I’m trying to book 2 seats on the first flight in the morning. We won’t lose so much time and we can do our programme then.” I waited for what felt like an eternity. Then the salvation: “I have it. You can cancel your booking. We’re leaving on the first flight.”
“Great, see you always stay optimistic.”
“Yeah, must listen to you more.” 😊
The day until departure went by quite quickly. We worked for half a day, then the suitcases were packed and finally we were off.
While I was not yet thinking about the return flight, Eva had already booked everything. Unfortunately, we lost a day due to the SAS pilots’ strike. We had to fly to Oslo late in the afternoon on Saturday, spend the night there and then take the first Norwegian Air flight to Geneva the next morning. That was the only way back to Switzerland.
Eva didn’t quite trust Norwegian Air yet. She had always flown with Swiss, SAS or Wideroe, but not yet with the Norwegian low-cost airline. I was relaxed about the whole thing. To be on the safe side, I had printed out the tickets for both of us on paper, but they were also online in the app.
We were there far too early, but no matter. There was no way we were going to miss the flight. I knew I wanted to buy something at the airport, but I only remembered when I had already checked in my suitcase. Exactly one luggage belt. Since we were going to fly 3 more times, I could still use it. We passed through security quickly and then went to a restaurant where we had dinner and waited for our flight.
At the gate, we took our last selfie in Switzerland. This served to document that we were both really on our way to Norway.
The flight was fully booked and went without incident and our luggage came with us. Eva had some clothes in her hand luggage, just in case, while I only had my photo equipment and trusted that our luggage would arrive. The advertisement said it would and it did.
“Hey Eva, we’re in Oslo,” I beamed at Eva as we walked to the Radisson blu. We spent the night there.
When we checked in, we each received 2x 0.5l mineral water. This was perfect, because I was really thirsty and so I didn’t have to search for mineral water at 11pm. We decided to book without breakfast as our flight left at 8:55am.
The rooms were also great.
