Trav's Travels: The long-way to Nor-way and travel problems

10/13/15

Had a sort of nightmarish travel to Norway. I had a 430am train from Bristol to London-Gatwick. I’ve timed it before and it takes me 25 minutes from my flat to the Bristol’s Temple Mead station, so I allowed 45 minutes just to be safe. Everything was going fine, but then I made a couple of foolish mistakes that I still can’t figure out what happened or why I panicked and made such mistakes. At about 4:05 I arrived to an intersection where all I had to do was go left and in 100 yards I would be at the parking lot that is then 200 yards to the station. When I got to this intersection there was a big billboard blocking the view of the station as well as some construction. It was completely dark, which didn’t help things. I saw some people coming down from the road on the right, so I was drawn to that and started heading that way, going right at the intersection. But as I crossed a bridge, I realized I wasn’t going in the right direction as I could see station buildings in the distance down to the left. So I came back to that fateful intersection. But instead of going straight and arriving to the station in a couple of minutes, I went right and under a bridge (turns out the train tracks). I expected the station to be shortly after going under the bridge but there was construction.

I assumed that if I kept walking I would loop around and arrive at the station. So I walked more and more and started feeling that if it didn’t loop around I was in big trouble, so that kept me walking forward. But then I realized it wouldn’t. So I turned around and started at a full sprint with my backpack and wheeled luggage. I had probably gone over a mile past the station. On the way back I saw a trashman and asked him directions. He directed me back to that intersection. He told me a direction to go (I assume, now, that he said right), but after running for a mile, being tired and overheated in all my coats, when I got to the intersection, I imagined he’d said left, so I went left (the way I had very originally gone (though it was a right-hand turn then, b/c I had been coming from a different direction) and this time I went further. It was up a hill and I was exhausted (maybe the fastest I’ve run a mile in some time), but I stopped and caught my breath when my watch showed the time my train was supposed to leave. As I caught my breath and took a second to think, I saw where the station should be and headed in the right direction, back towards the fateful intersection. From that intersection it of course took me about 2 minutes to the station. That’s how bloody close I had been. I was completely drenched in sweat, near tears, and in a bit of pain from running (it was the first time I’ve really run since I hurt my knee in Kenya the summer of 2014).

When I arrived to the station and confirmed that I’d missed my train, I was told I would need to buy a new ticket. I went to the computer kiosk to buy a ticket. Problem was that the next 2 trains would cost each about 120 pounds ($180) since it was last minute and they were high travel times. They told me I could probably get a cheaper ticket when the ticket office opened, but that wasn’t for another hour, so I would miss the next 2 trains, which would leave me with no chance to catch my flight at Gatwick.

So I walked over to the next train leaving to Reading (where I was to change trains for Gatwick), and I told the conductor lady my sad story of missing the train. I also told a bit of a white lie saying I was just desperate to catch my flight back home and as a student I couldn’t afford buying a new one. She took pity on me and said she was going to be my lucky star for the day and let me on her train. So I figured I could still make my flight at this stage. But the train had some diversions for construction and then they had a problem with the electric doors not closing, so we were delayed arriving to Reading. I had 2 minutes at Reading to catch my connecting train. I again sprinted at full speed, but the Reading station is huge and crowded, and I didn’t make it, so I had to wait for the next train to Gatwick, insuring that I would miss my Norwegian Air flight.

I finally arrived to Gatwick around 10am. My flight left at 9:20am. I had assumed, with a tad bit of doubt, however, that they would just put me standby on another flight to Oslo considering there was still 3 more direct and 3 others non-direct flights to Oslo that still had seats (I had checked using the free wifi on the train). When I got to the Norwegian Air counter, they told me that they do not deal with bookings or re-bookings and I had to go to this other desk. I went to that desk and they said I had to buy another flight. The cheapest flight they had in the next 2 days was 200 pounds ($300). That was extremely expensive considering my ticket to Norway had cost me $45. I didn’t know what to do, so I bought it b/c I did want to get to Norway. The airport offered 60 minutes of free wifi so I went online and saw that they had tickets online for about $60 which was completely frustrating to me considering how much I had just paid. But I was talking to Elisha and she said Norwegian allows you to cancel without penalty up to 4 hours after purchasing. So I bought the cheap ticket for the next day and cancelled the expensive one. This was the first time, in all my travels that I have ever missed a flight/train/bus/boat because of my own accord, and it certainly didn’t feel too great.

It was now around 11am and I had a whole day and night to hang out in the *lovely* Gatwick airport. Yipee… Like it’s budget brother Standsted, Gatwick is quite cold, boring, and in the middle of nowhere. They also lack even the basic creature comforts such as free water. I was exhausted from getting up so early, but they don’t have any great places to sleep while the airport is busy, so I just worked on my data entry. In the evening when the airport cleared out more, I was able to get a bit of sleep b/c I was able to take over a bench to sleep. But my flight was bright and early so I had to be up at 3:30am to check in.

10/14

The flight went smoothly and there was a total of about 10 people on my flight which was a big plane. In Oslo I bought a train ticket to Stange where Elisha’s friends Ingvar and Jessy live on a dairy farm.

I guess I should explain a bit of what Elisha is doing in Norway and how she knew these folks. Jessy is actually American and lived near to Elisha when they were growing up. Jessy’s mom is who we stayed with in Kalispell when we visited Glacier NP. At some point Jessy met and married Ingvar who is Norwegian and they moved back to Norway. Elisha actually lived with them and worked at the dairy farm there several years back. This fall, after finishing her exotic species job in Idaho, Elisha figured she’d head back to Norway to see her friends and make some money at the farm…though it sounds like she didn’t work on the farm as much as she had hoped.

Ingvar picked me up at the train station and took me to their farmhouse and made me some lunch. Jessy and Elisha arrived home several hours later. While I waited for them, I went to rest in bed, but was too excited to see Elisha to sleep, so instead I just watched the re-run of the democratic presidential debate.

That evening, Ingvar made a very tasty traditional Norwegian meal for us and we had lots of beer and wine that Jessy had picked up at duty free on a recent trip to Italy. We also finished the bottle of wine I had bought at the duty free b/c I knew that with taxes Scandinavian OH is quite expensive. For desert we had lots of chocolate that I had brought from England (Elisha had been complaining about how expensive the chocolate in Norway was) and a special apertiff drink that Jessy had for digesting a heavy Norwegian meal.

10/15

Today was the day that Elisha, Ingvar, and I were supposed to head out for a road trip through the western fjordlands and mountains of Norway. Ingvar has a VW camper bus that we were going to take. But on the day he picked me up, he realized that he had a water pump leak. He figured he could fix it, so he worked on the van while Elisha and I drove their car to Lillehammer, the site of the 1994 winter Olympic games. Lillehammer was a bit over an hour drive and when we got there, we hiked the 935 stairs to the top of the ski jump, which is the thing to do there.

10/16

The VW bus still wasn’t fixed so Ingvar spent the whole day working on it while Elisha, Jessy, and I stayed home working on backup plans and me doing some homework. Based on other experiences with VW’s, I had little optimism that the van would get going, so I was busy looking at alternatives. Finally, late into the night, Ingvar gave up after he stripped some bolts trying to replace the water pump. So with this news, we decided to rent a small budget car and do a car camping trip.

they had a crazy good deal on swix down jackets and Elisha and I knew we needed to get stylish puffy coats if we are to be able to fashionably fit in with Zach and Kaitlyn in Crested Butte