The first day of our Norwegian Adventure had arrived! Its fair to say we didnt feel particularly prepared…we have never taken an October holiday before and we kept sort of forgetting we were going! This led to last minute clothes washing, waterproof touser buying and a dash to get some money.

Which by the way…has fish on it.

Our next challenge was fitting all our stuff in the suitcase. Turns out woolly jumpers and thick clothes take up more room than summer clothes. Who knew?

We also decided to pack some dry food. We are self catering through out the week and Norway is notoriously pricey. So we shoved our winter clothes in amongst the porridge and flapjacks and just about managed to squeeze the suitcase shut.

We knew the first day was going to be a long one and the first part of that was getting up at 3am to drive down to Gatwick. There we met our friends who we are sharing the adventure with, had some breakfast and boarded our flight to Oslo!

The flight took about 1.5 hours and was peacefully uneventful. I was hoping to see epic mountains emerging out of the cloud cover but unfortunately the weather was quite poor and as we landed we got our first glimpse of the landscape. Along with the countryside and rain we felt like we had landed back in London!

The next part of our journey consisted of a 5ish hour wait in Oslo airport. Oslo is hands down the best airport we have been to. Very modern, clean and comfortable and we passed the time quite well watching Netflix, playing games and people watching. We also had some super tasty baguettes and the time passed quite quickly.

By the time we boarded our connecting flight to Narvik – the first stage of our trip – we were all dead on our feet but we were soon wide awake at the view of the beautiful sunset and then eventually the mountains peeking through the blanket of cloud.

We landed in Narvik a swift 1 hour and 25 minutes later to the ground sprinkled with snow and dark ice. We skidded our way out of the airport in the dark to our rental car. After a few trips around the car park we were used to the automatic and on our way!

We drove through the darkness towards Narvik not knowing what kind of scenery and landscape was hiding in the dark around us. We arrived at our hotel – Scandic Narvik – and after a quick comparison of views from our rooms, flopped into bed ready to sleep for the next days adventure and excited to see what the light of day would reveal!