If you ask my mother, patience is not one of my strongest suits. (Thanks, Mom.) But today’s travel gauntlet, I suspect, would test anyone’s resolve. My day began at 3:45 a.m. (a tip of my hat to Ben, who moonlit as my chauffeur this morning) with a flight out of Portland, led into a nearly five-hour wait in Minneapolis for our next flight to accept checked bags (which, in turn, prevented us from taking any advantage of the food and entertainment waiting on the other side of security), then changed scenery to the gate in Minneapolis where I now sit to write. We will soon take the 6.5-hour red-eye to Reykjavik, Iceland, departing for the two-hour leg to Oslo shortly thereafter, where we will be met with the task of trying to sleep in preparation for our final flight to Sogndal. There, our plane will land on a mountaintop runway that appears entirely too short to the untrained eye. The final tally: four flights, nearly 13 hours in the air, a total elapsed time of around 48 hours by the time we reach the final destination. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, indeed.
I’ve not much else to chronicle yet; sitting around in airports can only provide so much substance. I am already grateful that we learned from the folly of our previous trip and decided to visit Oslo at the end of the trip rather than the front end. I already don’t know what time it is and I haven’t even left the country yet.
More soon.
Where the Waterfalls Mean Home 