Dinner the night before we travel

It is now 14 years since we began the tradition of eating out the night before we travel. 

As I said in my blog post back then:

For us holidays always start the night before, rather than having pots and pans to wash and dry, we go out for a meal.

For the third year in a row we made our booking in Matsudai Ramen, the delightful restaurant recommended by Jay Rayner.

What I love about Matsudai Ramen, as well as the gorgeous ramen is the regular variation of ramen styles that they have on their menu. This is eating as education.

Travelling to Matsudai Ramen 

 

The bus from Tongwynlais to Cardiff only takes 20 to 30 minutes, as long as the traffic isn't bad, so with our meal booked for 5pm we caught the 132 in Tongwynlais at 3.52pm.

We arrived in the City Centre at 4.20pm to the tremendously loud noise of Fontaines D.C. a band I'd never heard of, who were performing at Cardiff Castle this evening, the castle being right in the centre of the city, near where the 132 stops.

We walked from Greyfriars Road, down Westgate Street and then down the side of the river. What appeared to be a regimented band of seagulls were sailing like a flotilla up the River Taff:

The last time we had been along the river side we were with Robin and Liz Croft after a meal at the Vegetarian Food Studio nearby. At that time the buildings beside the old Brains Brewery were merely metal shells, they are now almost complete.

Matsudai Ramen 

 

We arrived at Matsuadai Ramen at 5pm and were seated in the same seats in which we were sat the last time we were here, last September! A pleasant coincidence

We choose three starters to share. The secret to eating here is to get your starters before ordering your Ramen - otherwise the soup can come before the starters.

We began with Cucumber tataki, we had had cucumber dishes here before, but never this particular take. It was made of large chunks of cucumber with whipped tofu and chilli crisp - the tofu and chilli have a great tanginess to the crunchy cucumber, a flavour explosion with every bite.

Our second starter was Karaage mushroom, these triple-fried oyster mushrooms with karaage (light Japanese curry) were also delicious. We've had them many times before, but love them again each time.
 

Our final starter (in the order they arrived) was Pork gyoza, a new dish on the menu here. It was a pork and vegatable gyoza with a soy dipping sauce, this traditional Japanese dish is done very well here, with soft wrap and a tangy filling.

For his main Drew had the traditional Shoyu ramen, this golden chicken chintan and seafood dashi double-soup with shoyu tare, wavy noodles, chiyu, pork shoulder chashu, menma, nori and seasoned egg, is the flavour that attracted us to the restaurant the first time we eat here. Since last year we have tried traditional Ramen in Japan itself, during our visit to Tokyo, and the one here is as good as that high quality location. Drew really enjoyed it.

I opted for a new item on the menu, the Iekei-inspired tonkotsu-shoyu ramen. This Yokohama-style ramen has a rich, salty pork and chicken bone soup with iekei shoyu tare, chiyu, iekei-inspired noodles, pork belly chashu, spinach, nori and seasoned egg. This new ramen flavour was right up my street as far as flavour goes. I really loved the chicken bone and pork fat broth, apologies to vegetarian friends! The vegetables and meat with infused with the delicious taste of the broth.

The restaurant explains more about the background to this delightful dish here. 

I opted for the rice and extra nori, recommended with the Yokohama ramen, Drew decided not to miss out and had rice and extra nori too, only my version is photoed.

There was none of my juicy, slightly fatty, ramen left - this meant we could see the logo at the bottom of the bowl. Note the dai of Matsuadai being used to form the Welsh expression Da Iawn - very good - and it truly is just that here!

Back Home

We left Cardiff at 7pm and were home by 7.30pm. We checked everything was ready for the off tomorrow and got to bed at 10pm, so we can be up and fresh ready for the morning.

Getting down to the details

Constraints

In my post yesterday I outlined the initial stages of planning for the holiday leading to booking the flights to Oslo and back from Stockholm. Talking of flights, my SAS app had this message for me as I logged in this morning at 8.15am. Only 26 hours to go before we can check-in online.

My first thoughts after booking the airline tickets was looking at where to stay and for how long in each place.

The first set of constraints in the planning is about the travel. Google Maps, as ever, proved vital for addressing this. Though I still get annoyed with their public transport option being called 'transit', which when I was a child meant carrying a person or thing from place to place, not anything to do with public transport, but I guess we have to live with the Americanisation. (Drew, I'm sure, would say this complaint is showing I'm becoming a grumpy old man!)

The maps gave me a sense of travel time and a sense of distance between places (which is often larger than it looks). Which was a good basis for the planning. 

The second constraint was church locations. Having spent most of my travelling holidays in the USA, Canada and Southern Europe, all of which are blessed with lots of Catholic churches, it has normally been easy to book hotels in locations where the church was nearby, in fact the furthest I've ever had to travel from a hotel to Mass while on holiday was 48 miles in Newfoundland. 

Norway, with its long standing Lutheran tradition is somewhat different to that - indeed there are only 38 churches in the whole country and 27 of those are in the southern Diocese of Oslo and the other 11 widely spread across the large landmass of the centre and north of the country. So, I needed to make sure I booked hotels close enough to churches, this meant that some of my intial travel day suggestions got amended to take account of being somewhere I could get to mass on the latter two Sundays (the first Sunday being easy in Oslo) and the Holyday of Obligation on Friday, August 15th. Thankfully I managed to sort that with help from the Mass Times and locations on the various church websites/Facebook pages.  

Accommodation in Norway

An outline plan complete, it was time to look at accommodation. Those who have followed my blogs over the years will know that I have often opted for one brand of hotel, so that I know what type of experience I am getting. This started with the cheaper brands - Comfort/Quality hotels, gradually working up through Best Western hotels in the US/Canada and latterly to IHG, the International Hotel Group, especially Holiday Inns. 

So, early in 2025 (booking hotels for the following summer has long been a Christmas Week fun activity for me) I began my search of IHG hotels in Norway, to find that there are exactly 0! I looked at alternative brands - two years ago, in our last European trip we stayed in a Thon Hotel in Stockholm and really enjoyed the clean, colourful, refreshing style and wonderful breakfast - so with this in mind, I was pleased to see that the Thon Hotel Group is a Norwegian company, whose CEO is Olav Thon, i.e. a family owned operation, and so I began looking at the cities/towns we were visiting and started to book Thon Hotels in the places we were staying.

Of course, even with 89 Thon Hotels in the country, they aren't everywhere. Olden, for example, is a small town with only local hotels - we booked the Olden Fjordhotel there. For some reason, back in January, neither of the two Thon Hotels in Tromsø were taking bookings, hence I looked outside those options and choose a Radisson Blu hotel in Tromsø. We are going back to the same hotel in Stockholm at the end of the holiday.

Travelling in Norway

With the accommodation booked the next stage was time to look at the detailed travel bookings. As most train and bus companies don't enable booking until 3 or 4 months before travel. I started with the ferry from Bodø to Tromsø and booked that on the 17th of February, the day after bookings opened.

Next it was to the trains and coaches, as I looked more closely at travel in Norway I was surprised to find that the main provider of trains and long-distance coaches was an organisation called Vygruppen branded very simply as Vy.

It turned out that this organisation was a rebranding (in 2019) of the Norwegian State Railways, so with their app downloaded I began to book overland travel. 

The app was simple to use and the train from Oslo to Bergen, the coaches from Bergen to Olden and Olden to Trondheim and the train from Trondheim to Bodø were all booked on the 17th of April, once they were all available. 

This left the leg from Tromsø to Stockholm to be booked. This was to be broken up by a stop at Kiruna, a Lapland town I had long wanted to visit, more about why later in the blog. I assumed this was going to be a very easy process, as unlike the VY app, which I had to sign up for as a new user, I already had a SJ (Swedish Railway) account from my sleeper train booking between Stockholm and Hamburg in 2013. However this was not as simple as it looked. 

From April until June I began to check the train availability weekly, then in July daily,  and on the two dates - 18th and 20th August the message on both legs of the journey said: Track maintenance is being scheduled, please check back closer to the time of travel with a link then led to this, less than comforting, message:

It felt like playing chicken with Swedish Railways - would there be a train, would the train run on the days we needed (the hotels already having been booked). The truth is a car journey would have been possible between Tromsø and Kiruna and a plane flies twice daily from Kiruna to Stockholm, so we wouldn't have got stuck, but it did cause an uncomfortable frésense of excitement - I can hear my friends Lloyd and Chrissi laughing heartily at this, as they are fans of last minute planning; to restate the obvious: I'm not! 

Finally, on the 17th of July, less than two weeks before our departure from home, the trains for the week beginning the 17th of August appeared on the website and I was able to book those that suited my pre-existing plans! I breathed a sigh of relief - that was way to close for my taste. Though thankfully all worked well.

Food

What about the food, I hear my regular readers say, well that was far less frenetic, thankfully!

The Michelin starred restaurant in Bergen opened its bookings five months in advance. The ones in Oslo, Trondheim and Stockholm opened bookings three months in advance and I'd set up calender reminders to book them on the days they opened their bookings, so all were complete by the 22nd of May, a much less panic ridden process than the trains!   

   

Being mobile by mobile

On my travels in 2023 and 2024 I noted how pervasive the mobile phone has become in the process of holiday making - indeed it seems to be impossible to plan and book a holiday like this one without a mobile. It is not just a mobile phone but a plethora of mobile apps that become essential companions on the visit.

Here are this year's selection:

• Stagecoach - For our journey from Tongwynlais to Cardiff
• National Express - For the journey from Cardiff to Heathrow
• IHG - The Heathrow Hotel
• SAS - Flights to Oslo and from Stockholm
• Flytoget - Airport Express from Oslo Airport to the City
• Ruter - Oslo local transport (bus and subway) 
• Vy - Norweigan Trains and Long-Distance Coaches
• Skyss Billett - Local Buses in Vestland region of Norway
• Svipper - Local Buses in the Troms region of Norway 
• SJ - Statens Järnvägar - Swedish State Railways
• SL - Local Tunnelbana, Tram and bus in Stockholm
• Arlanda Express - Airport Express from Stockholm to the Airport
• Thon Hotels - See earlier comments
• Radisson Hotels - For one of our nights
• Flickr - The photo sharing app
• KLM - This is the trick one, it is for our next trip, next March, when we are using KLM from Cardiff to Berlin for Drew to complete his sixth and final Super Half marathon.

So, it feels like everything is ready, tomorrow the journey starts, or perhaps it starts tonight with our meal out. I'll be back to post about that tomorrow.

A holiday some time in the planning

Scandinavia

It was back in August 2019 that we decided we would visit Scandinavia on holiday, in that year, when we were still on our trip to Alaska and Hawai'i, I'd begun to draft some notes for a trip planned in 2020, I suspect it doesn't surprise anyone that this didn't happen!!

That draft document, an update of which was dated 8th September 2019, has some relevant ideas:

• Oslo to Bergen – (6h 32m – Direct)
• Bergan to Olden – (5h 55m by Bus – Direct)
• Olden to Trondheim (7h 34m 3:34 by Bus to Otta then 3hr train to Trondheim) 
• Trondheim to Stockholm (11h 15m by Train, change at Storlien)

Though at the time the plans covered the whole of Scandinavia and some other parts of Northern Europe - indeed most of the list formed the holiday we took two years ago - Europe 2023, but it left Norway unvisited, which became the inspiration for this holiday.

 

Deciding where to visit

So, the question becomes how to choose where to visit in Norway?

Oslo and Bergen were obvious places to visit as the largest two cities in the country. 

The capital, Oslo, seemed a must given its influence on the rest of the country, 20% of the total population of Norway live in the City. 

Bergen seemed to make sense too as it was one of the key cities in the Hanseatic League and historical entity we had tracked in recent years from Boston, Lincolnshire and Kings Lynn and Norwich and on to Riga, Tallinn, Cologne and Hamburg. 

Another must was Olden, set on the southern shore of the Nordfjorden (North Fjord). Why a 'must'? Because Drew [aka the co-pilot] has always maintained a Viking heritage based on the shaky premise that his surname and the name of this village are the same! So, how could we possibly miss out on it.

Given the location of Olden, the next big town we could visit was Trondheim. In addition to its location Trondheim has the additional attraction of its ancientness. Not only was it the Viking capital from 997 onwards, but from 1030 until the Lutheran reformation in 1537 was the location of the Shrine of St. Olav, Norway's patron saint. Until the reformation the shrine was famous throughout Europe with many pilgrims coming from all over the continent.

Having started with this basis for our travels and with plenty of time left, we decided it would be exiting to travel north of the Artic Circle. We had been within 190 miles of the Circle while in Fairbanks, Alaska, but hadn't managed to get further North, but here in Norway we have the chance. This visit seemed to good a chance to venture there, so we set our minds to Tromsø which turns out to be 220 miles north of the circle. It seems very exciting to be heading there - but we shall see.

The other stops on our journey - Bodø on the way north and Kiruna on the way south were informed by the long distances involved, but, as I'm sure we will see, both have their charms.  

By mid-November 2024, two weeks after we got back from last year's holiday in Australia, we confirmed our general plans and booked the first item on the holiday - the flight from Heathrow to Oslo (and back from Stockholm) with SAS.

Reflecting on our plans

On our holiday in 2023 we visited 11 cities in 23 days, it was a wonderful trip, but felt very, very busy. In 2024, as well as travelling halfway around the world we again did an amazing amount of travelling 13 different places in a longer 30 days, again it was a busy time. So much so that I concluded my last blog post of that holiday saying: "PS - Note to self, build some downtime into the next holiday to keep the blog up to date!!" and it feels that having 8 destinations in 24 days will I hope achieve this outcome. We shall see!

Detailed Planning

Of course, there was much more detailed planning to do, now that the framework had been set - more about that in tomorrow's post. 

Taking the North Way

Welcome

 

Welcome to our holiday blog for 2025. It is great to have you on the journey with us and regardless if you are a regular 'follower' of our holiday blogs, or have just come across it by accident you are most welcome. 

As the image in the background to the blog (and below) shows, the plan this year is to do a tour of Norway, with a bit of Sweden included. 

One of the challenges of setting up a blog is to find a url that isn't to difficult to remember for those people who like to type the name in for themselves. I tried all varieties of Norway and its various names and found it was the Welsh language version (Norwy) that hadn't been already used, hence the url: norwy2025.blogspot.com/ 

The name of the country

Talking about names I was intrigued to discover that the English word for Norway has its roots in the phrase "way leading to the north" or "the northern way" apparently that is Norþweg in Anglo Saxon! Since the 880s this title has been ascribed to the country in English, the Welsh version seems to have been derived from the English. Norway itself has two names for itself: Norge in the Bokmål form of the language and Noreg in the Nynorsk form - it looks like there could be a whole degree course on the distinction between the two forms of the language - from those interested this Visit Norway page gives a clear (if lengthy) explanation.

So, in saying we are going to Norway it seems like we are going the North Way, and indeed from our starting place to our final location in the country we will be travelling almost 10° of northerly latitude - from 59.91° N to 69.64° N - a similar variation of that from Cardiff to Barcelona in a southerly direction. i.e. Norway is a long, if narrow country. 

The size of the country 

It is always a source of amusement to me, and other Welsh folk, when journalists (often English journalists) use Wales as a unit of measurement, this BBC article in 2019 explored this phenomenon . But in thinking of the size of Norway I felt it might be a useful comparison as it brings out some stark factors. 

In population Norway is 1.75 times the size of Wales (3.2 million and 5.6 million respectively) but in terms of landmass Norway is 18 times the size of Wales (8,192 square miles compared to 385,207 square miles) and in terms of coastline Norway is 31 times bigger than Wales (1,680 miles compared to 51,748). So, Norway is going to have a lot more space and a lot more coast per person than Wales does and, as one of the Welsh poets, Harri Webb, said: the centre of Wales is a green desert, due to its tiny population. I suspect Norway is going to be the same, but even more so!!

Our Route

The map below (which is also the background to the blog) is a representation of our route. I say a representation as this is the Google view of the route if we had been travelling by car, whereas in fact we will be travelling by train, coach, bus and boat along the route. 

Of course the map doesn't include the journey from Tongwynlais to Oslo or our return from Stockholm only the Scandinavian part of the journey. The full plan of our travel is as follows:

Norway Trip

Day	From	To
Thursday, July 31st	Cardiff	Heathrow
Friday, August 1st	Heathrow	Oslo
Monday, August 4th	Oslo	Bergen
Wednesday, August 6th	Bergen	Olden
Saturday, August 9th	Olden	Trondheim
Wednesday, August 13th	Trondheim	Bodø
Thursday, August 14th	Bodø	Tromsø (arrive 15th)
Monday, August 18th	Tromsø	Kiruna
Wednesday, August 20th	Kiruna	Stockholm (arrive 21st)
Saturday, August 23rd	Stockholm	Cardiff

Comments on the blog

As ever, I will really welcome comments on the blog, be you friends, family, neighbours or indeed any strangers reading this. I hope the blog will make you feel some of the excitement I feel for my travels around the Nordic powerhouse that is Norway. 

You are most welcome to join us on the journey and your comments, updates and corrections are always very, very welcome.

A gentle request: If you use the anonymous feature to comment please add your name to the message. I want to make the blog as accessible as possible, so won't limit it to people logged in to a Google account, but in the past I've ended up replying to someone who wasn't actually the anonymous person I thought they were, so if you aren't logged in to Google, please leave your name in the message!

The holiday feels like it has begun

With the setting up of the blog and the other preparations complete it almost feels as if the holiday has begun already. Even more so as I logged on to my emails this afternoon to find the following:

Yes, they are all holiday related with the bottom one being our booking for the meal the night before the trip, the middle one being the confirmation emails from National Express of our time of travel on Thursday and the top one being the airport hotel where we will stay on Thursday night. 

It feels like we are ready for the trip.

Tomorrow's Post

Before I answer a lot of questions like 'Why Norway?' or 'Why these places in Norway/Sweden?' Th thinking behind the trip will be the focus of tomorrow blog post and I expect to write another about the booking process before we actually start the journey. I look forward to seeing you all again then.