Our Norwegian Adventure
Long Travel Day(s)
We started off our first day of travel by waking up too early in the morning. Elijah decided that he was way to excited about his first international trip that he needed to wake us up at 5 a.m. We knew that it would be a long couple days and were hoping for a little more sleep. Oh well! That is life with a toddler. We left The Dalles around 11 a.m. to drive down The Gorge to the airport. We checked in and made it through security after I got a pat down because I wouldn’t let them open Elijah’s milk. I bought shelf milk for a reason! If it was opened, I would have had to trash it. They were nice about it, but super confused. It’s always great when you can throw security for a loop with milk for your child. We quickly found some lunch and then made our way to the play area to let Elijah run around until our plane left. We were hoping that this would make him tired and he’d sack out on the plane right away since he also skipped his nap.
He didn’t fall asleep right away. Brent and I broke down and brought out a movie for him to enjoy. (This was a planned exception to our no screen time). There was an empty seat, so Elijah got his own and enjoyed it for the first hour and a half or so of our seven hour plane ride. Not a bad start. Then the little man decided that he was tired, but fought falling asleep on the plane. He went back and forth for the next several hours of being happy and being cranky. It made for some rough moments, walking up and down the aisle, visiting with the flight attendants and passing him around between the four of us (grandma, grandpa and Brent and I. Auntie Krista hadn’t joined us yet). He finally sacked out on Brent about an hour and a half or so left in our flight. Brent sacked out too.
We made it to Reykjavik and the little man woke up. I put him in the Boba carrier and finally got him to pass back out before we met up with Krista. It was so great to see Krista get off the plane. We were so excited to see her! Now our trip really could begin. One more flight and then we would be in Norway. We got on our next plane after making it through customs. Elijah woke up for a brief moment while we were getting settled on the plane and during that fun take off. Elijah had his moments of waking up off and on, but he was passed out. We found where we needed to go once we landed in Oslo. We hopped on the train to take us to the city center and we were off to find our Airbnb.
Elijah woke up on the train, but was a happier boy. After hours of not sleeping, Brent and were struggling to follow the key pickup instructions. After too long, we had our keys and were on our way to pass out for the night before traveling again. We took shifts hanging out with our kiddo since it was a nine hour difference. He took a short little nap in the stroller near auntie Krista. Then, Krista woke up not knowing where she was. She jumped up and ran to the door and opened it and coincidentally woke up Elijah. Then the shift work began with all of us trying to get as much sleep as possible. It was another long night, but I think we all managed to at least get a few hours of sleep. We woke up the next morning and started making our way back to the airport in the rain to make our final trek up north to Tromso to get our vacation started.