norway

I took the fact that I was having a tough time keeping my eyes open during the Norwegien version of the U.S. hit show “So you think you can dance?” as a sign that perhaps jetlag wasn’t going to be a huge deal. It was about 10:30 last night and my body was saying in no uncertain terms that it was time to shut the light off and go to sleep. The woman at the front desk recommended I head off to the airport at 6am for my 8am flight to Tromso, so doing the math backwards, I figured I could get almost 7 hours of sleep if I went to right to bed.

FAST FORWARD 90 minutes

My eyes popped open and my body said - “what the heck are you doing sleeping in the middle of the day?” Not to dwell on what happened over the next five hours before my alarm went off, but let’s just say I didn’t sleep much of it.

When I arrived in Oslo, my box was in NEARLY the condition I expected it to be in. I say “nearly” because I half expected it to be completely empty. The good news is that everything was accounted for despite an entire end being open and the only thing holding it shut was the bag tag.

After going through customs, I called the B&B to send a shuttle to pick me up and 10 minutes later I was laying in a nice bed. I went for a walk around the area just to do something besides sit and then unpacked some things for tomorrow (specifically, warm clothes). It’s probably in the low 40’s to high 30’s outside right now, but when I set foot outside the plane tomorrow afternoon, it's going to be about 60 degrees "cooler".

OK, maybe he wasn’t a “wise” man in the classic sense, but relative to the company he kept, he was quite the thinker. Part of what is making this journey to the North Pole so interesting is the logistical exercise of researching and collecting the appropriate gear, physically getting to Longyearbyen when no flights out of the States hook up neatly with flights from Oslo to Longyearbyen – and then there’s the training for the marathon itself (which at this point is the least of my worries – I’ll be ready as ever to run if I can manage the TRUE challenge of getting myself to the starting line!)