December 27, 2023

Leaving DC, we boarded the flight assuming the trip to Reykjavik would be dull. It started out that way. We took in Indiana Jones – The Dial of Destiny. (I had not realized Phoebe Waller-Bridge was in and I kept expecting her to break the forth wall and start narrating)

Shortly after the movie we started to learn about the excellence of the Chesapeake Club at BWI from the man in 2F. He began sharing his displeasure that he had not been admitted to the club with his IcelandAir Saga Class ticket by shouting at everyone. He ranted for a while, tried to fight a burly Icelandic man and got himself strapped to the seat for the duration of the flight. Turns out this also got him express deplaning courtesy of the Iceland Police. The flight attendant had never had to deal with something this bad in her 18 years and it was a crazy start to the trip.

Everything else was pretty normal from there. We saw our first snow landing in Iceland and Oslo delivered also.

In Oslo we had to go out and back through security. They still make you take out everything. I had not had to do that in ages and proved poor at it. They had to manually inspect two of our bags and run one back through. We will see if we do better on our next trip through.

The views were amazing along the way…snowy forests, mountains, and more. Watching the sun rise and set was a trip.

We arrived in Tormso around 16:30 and it was pitch black.

Driving in Norway was interesting. We drove through Tromso and a bunch of roundabouts. Including an underground one.

We hope we did well. The whole drive involved lots of yielding (or I do not know what a stop sign is here) and no visible lines due to snow covering the road. We took it slow and followed the lead of others as much as possible.

After picking up our winter gear from Tromso Outdoor (thanks to Anna for staying late) we started the journey to the hotel. It was a 60 minute drive and a lot more roundabouts. The road was not bad at all and we arrived at our hotel Yggdrasiltunet Gårdshotell. It is pretty cool and should be nice.

After some dinner we turned in to get some much needed rest. It was about 19 hours of no sleep and we were ready to try and get rested for the next day.