David Currie

We were up early (if not bright) on Monday morning with Eastleigh Area Cars arriving at seven to take us to the airport. (They would take our child seat back to their Chandler’s Ford office from where a friend would then pick it up.) They hadn’t taken the hint about the amount of luggage we would have and it took fifteen minutes to shoe-horn it in to the taxi. The M3 was pretty busy around Winchester as it always is at this time of day. The taxi driver, however, seemingly hadn’t noticed the warning sign for an accident at junction 3 and was surprised when we joined a slow moving queue around 4a. He then told us he didn’t really know the back roads and his road atlas was buried in the boot. Fortunately Christine managed to extract my sat-nav (review still to come) and that took us across to the M4 and in to Heathrow.

We arrived at Terminal 3 with only marginally over an hour to go before take off. Fortunately there were no queues at check-in and the flight was even sufficiently empty that we could get an extra seat for Emma. It was, however, a bit of a rush through security with only time for a quick nappy change before heading for the gate.

Emma was remarkably well behaved on the flight. Perhaps this had something to do with getting her lunch followed by large quantities of raisins as she started to get a bit edgy on the descent. As we touched down at a sunny Gardemoen airport it all finally seemed real – we had made it to Norway!

The guy behind the Hertz desk took one look at our luggage and obligingly found us the largest C class car on their books. Despite being parked in space 007, I don’t think James Bond would be seen dead in a Skoda Roomster! As the rather unimaginative name suggests though, what it lacks in looks, the car certainly makes up with in space and it swallowed our luggage without difficulty.

From there it was a 45 minute drive, giving Emma just enough time to adjust to the novelty of a forward facing car seat and then drop off to sleep. We were met by a smiling landlord who had made our furnished apartment very welcoming with a couple of vases of yellow tulips and a bowl of fruit and chocolates (although he had left me to hang one of his new pictures on the wall!). It then wasn’t long before we had spoilt the clean modern look of the accommodation by scattering our belongings everywhere.

I went in to the IBM office yesterday which was pretty deserted. In addition to Good Friday and Easter Monday, Norwegians also have Maundy Thursday as a public holiday and, with many businesses shutting at lunchtime on Wednesday, a lot of people just take the whole week leading up to Easter off. This is nice in that it means I can spend some time settling in with Christine and Emma but it has meant that our shipping, which touched down yesterday afternoon, didn’t make it through customs in time to be delivered today. We’ll now have to survive until next Tuesday with what we brought with us. An obligatory trip to IKEA this morning filled some gaps but we will, for example, still be balancing Emma on ours knees for mealtimes until next week. We also won’t have the baby carrier for any exploring we might do this weekend.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Family, Travel, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.