The day finally came for our departure from Norway. The apartment inspection was fairly cursory – undoubtedly a good thing but still annoying when you’ve spent a lot of time cleaning! We then drove to the airport and returned the hire car for the final time. We were flying BA as their midday flight was the most convenient. We weren’t particularly impressed by the “fast” bag drop which took over 45 minutes. The check-in staff did, however, manage to move my seat. I was on a separate booking to Christine and Emma and had the mistake of checking in first only to discover that I then couldn’t change their seat online.
The flight was pretty uneventful. It was only when we came to the descent that she screamed for a few minutes – presumably because of ear trouble. We were bussed the short distance to Terminal 5. I’d have thought you would have tried to provide enough piers when building a new terminal building but never mind. There was practically no queue for passport control and it was only a short wait for the baggage to arrive. They’ve even finally joined the rest of the world in having baggage trolleys where you push the bar down to release the break rather than to engage it!
We hired a car (and child seat back) to get us back to Southampton (thanks for the suggestion Adrian). We just missed the Hertz shuttle bus so had a 15 minute wait to get us to the rental depot. We were given a Ford Focus very similar to that we’d just left in Oslo. The most significant difference was the reduced size of the boot which I put down to having a full size spare wheel rather than the quick repair kit we had in Norway.