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.