Goodbye Norge! Hello Iceland!

24 June 2013

I wasn’t in bed before 1:00am this morning and then woke up at 4:30 thinking about all the things we had to do today, and couldn’t go back to sleep.  I hate that.  I ran on adrenalin all day.  I also hadn’t written either of my articles for the newspaper and my latest deadline is Mondays, so I knew I was in trouble.  I used those early hours to go through old Norway articles and re-did one about the fire that burned the city, so I could include my latest experiences at the Miracle House, so at least I got that job done before anyone else woke up.  I was in a panic about what to write for the Life on the Ridge column though as nothing was coming to me, so I just ignored it.

I had massive amounts of cleaning to do, even though our tenant said she’d do the big scrub down after we left, I just couldn’t leave her with spilled gunk in the frig, burned gunk in the oven and crumbs on the breadboard.  I needed to wipe down everything, and finish packing up the kitchen, which had to wait til last so we could eat up as much food as possible.  Tante Aslaug was happy to take our remnants.

We were all busy with the final day’s prep work – Kory took the plates off the car and delivered them into the car registration place so we could cancel our insurance.  He took Kaleb’s bike to do that, then went to the post office to give our change of address.  He called our condo association to get the condo dues bills sent to us via email and he tried to shut off our internet and electric, but ran into a few roadblocks and needed help. (Above - moving furniture "Moa style" with a shopping cart!)

Kaleb took his bike over to say goodbye to a few friends then came home and started vacuuming and wiping down the floors – we were all busy as busy could be.  I so wanted to go see my friend Sandra before we left town and give her little boy another kiss on the cheek, but I knew we couldn’t make it – so she called in sick and came over to say goodbye to us!  I was so touched by that.  And by the time she and her family showed up, we were nearly done packing and cleaning so we actually sat down for about an hour and visited with them, which was so nice.  Her husband Karl helped us get through shutting off our electricity account and also showed me how to file my taxes on-line.  What an angel sent by God at the time I needed it most.  So all in all, we got it all done at the last minute.

When they left we had less than an hour for final clean up so I just shoved things in boxes and put them in the front seat of our car.  The worst part was the final laundry wasn’t dry so I had to spread out wet laundry all over the inside of our car so it will dry over the next two years.  Funny.  If anyone breaks in, they will be greeted by underwear sitting on top of everything, including the dashboard.  I’m so glad we have a car cover so no one can see inside that vehicle.  It’s worse than hillbillies.

So we made it to the bus stop (above) to catch the airport shuttle with three minutes to spare.  Whew.  I prayed before we checked in, as we are only allowed one piece of luggage to Oslo, since it’s a domestic flight, but last year, because we were going all the way to America, they waived it and gave us the 2 piece allowance.  We fly SAS to Oslo, then switch to Iceland Air to Seattle and they have some agreement to cooperate like that.  Well, this time we were just flying to Iceland so I was worried because we weren’t going straight to America, we’d have to pay $65 each for all 3 extra bags, but I asked the woman if we needed to do that and she said, “I know what the rules say” and then she didn’t say another word.  She printed out six luggage tickets and put the bags on the conveyor belt without charging us a thing.  Oh, I was so thankful!

I had a slight scare going through security as a friend had given Kaleb a very fancy letter opener that looks like a knife, and I’d placed it in the wrong piece of luggage, so it ended up in my carry-on bag!  They caught that right away, but then, being a small airport and all, just sent it back to the luggage handler and told him to put it in our luggage.  I was ever so thankful for that one, too.

While we were waiting at the airport for our flight, Kory told me I should write a Life on the Ridge article about all the luggage we travel with, and boy did I have material for that one.  In five minutes my fingers flew across the keyboard and I was done and it was off to my editor.  Talk about last minute!  Another thing off my to do list for today.  Whew.

We arrived in Iceland (above) at 10:30pm and got to our hotel at midnight, only to find out they’d messed up our reservation and we only had two beds in our room.  So we are waiting and waiting for the third bed and it’s now 1:00am.  I’m not sure how I’m still functioning on such little sleep, but it’s still been a good day.