Bergjord Boarding

Jump to Norway Itinerary Rundown

Way back in November of 2018, Luke changed our lives forever by asking me to be his wife on Thanksgiving Day. We opted for a year and a half engagement over planning a wedding in about 6 months and being restricted only to vendors that hadn’t been booked already.

Part of this planning process was picking where we would want to go on our honeymoon. Several ideas were floated around, but we settled on Norway. A big deciding factor in this decision was the fact that Luke has family from Norway and grew up enjoying many Norwegian traditions and foods. Now wielding a very Norwegian last name myself, I was very excited to explore and share in the traditions of my future family. I also knew that Norway was a very safe, clean, and beautiful country which was very appealing to someone that had never travelled internationally.

Since neither of us had flown internationally, we invested in very thorough research. Luckily, we had an amazing in-person source as well as my vocal instructor from college had lived in Norway for a while and made trips there and had a lot of great insider information for us! One of her suggestions ended up being the greatest blessing in disguise we could have asked for on our travel journey. She mentioned that the easiest and cheapest way to get to Norway would be to fly into Iceland. Keflavik is a small airport, and there are large layovers between flights, so instead of waiting around at the airport for 8 hours, we decided we might as well spend a few days in Iceland before making our way to Norway. Best decision ever.

So with our wedding date set for July 18, 2020, we confidently booked our flights in August. However, if you are looking at that date, specifically the year, you may have already figured out that a world wide shutdown due to the COVID 19 pandemic had other plans. We forged ahead with our wedding and had the most wonderful backyard wedding limited to 50 guests, but our flights were unfortunately cancelled. We were issued refunds or vouchers for all of our purchases, but our hearts still ached and mourned the loss of our big honeymoon adventure, especially since we didn’t know when things would be returned to “normal” so that we would be able to go on this big adventure we had invested so much time and money planning.

While we patiently (well somewhat patiently) waited for international flights to reopen, we instead took a “mini-moon” trip to Wisconsin Dells and still had a lovely time celebrating our marriage. The year 2021 rolled in, and international travel was slowly being reopened in some countries, but the restrictions and requirements meant we would be quarantined for 14 days before getting to start our exploring, so we knew 2021 would be a no-go for our honeymoon as well. In 2022, my sister and future brother-in-law were getting married, so we flew out to Los Angeles to spend some time with them and host a bridal shower for Alyssa. We wanted to give them our undivided time and attention for any planning questions or help in any way we could, so we decided to postpone our honeymoon one last time.

That brings us to 2023. Our flights were officially rebooked and all our accommodations and special event tickets purchased. Our passports were updated (I never got to use my first one because I had ordered a passport for the first time for our 2020 honeymoon in my maiden name and had changed my last name by the time we actually were going on our honeymoon), and we were confident we had everything ready to go and couldn’t wait. While we had originally booked our trip in August, we decided we would rather go in May. Winter would be almost completely faded away, but the tourism and big crowds wouldn’t have started to flock and fill the streets yet, so everything (including the plane tickets) would be just a little bit less expensive. At first we thought we might go right after the school year ended, but in my years of teaching experience, we had always had at least one snow day to makeup. However, we had never gone past Memorial Day, so we decided to depart the Sunday before Memorial Day.

Once again, life threw us a curveball as we were hit with one of the worst winters our town had ever seen. Before winter break, we had already missed 7 days of school. We then proceeded to miss 6 more in the spring. This number of makeup days was unheard of, and everyone was starting to panic. At this point, school would go into June, and I would be paying out my ears to have a sub cover my days because I had already used my paid leave for Alyssa and Evan’s wedding. Luckily, our district decided that instead of pushing school an extra two weeks, teachers would make up extra time before or after school, and we would just come back the extra 5 days and be done before Memorial Day.

While this was, of course, overall great news, it also meant that school was ending Friday the 26th, and our flight out of Minneapolis was Sunday the 28th. This made May a very busy and hectic month for us, but we were happy to do it because it meant we were finally going on our long-awaited honeymoon.

I am going to include a rough itinerary of our time in Norway that will be later linked to posts where we will be able to go into more detail about each adventure or excursion instead of trying to squeeze everything into one post here. (Hopefully you stick around and check in for when these posts are shared!)

Our first day in Norway was shorter and consisted of our arrival, finding and settling into our Airbnb, and getting some supper. The next day, we hopped on a train that took us to Lillehammer where we got to explore some of the shopping, museums, and history of this cool little town! The next two days were a part of the big adventure we had booked for our time here called Norway in a Nutshell. The first part of the trip was the long train ride into Bergen where we got the evening to shop and explore before spending the night in a local Airbnb. The following day was full of adventure and different modes of transportation as we got to ride several different railways, hop on a bus to the Stalheim hotel lookout, take an amazing fjord cruise, and stop at an enchanting waterfall before making our way back to Oslo later that evening. We got more time in Oslo the next day and got to walk around the beautiful Oslo Opera House and went through the Munch Museum to see the infamous “The Scream” painting before enjoying food tasting at Oslo Street Food, located only a few blocks from our Oslo Airbnb. For our last day, we got to check our luggage in at the train station so that we could check out of Airbnb but still be able to explore a little more of the city before our afternoon flight. We enjoyed seeing a different area of Oslo and eating some pizza at a popular Norwegian pizza chain called Peppes Pizza.