A plan B is always good to have

We haven’t even started the trip and we are already using a plan B. We were supposed to meet in Gothenburg today, the 24^th of June. But J got stuck in a traffic jam in Germany. Traffic jams in Germany can be extremely annoying - you can be standing still for hours. Yeah – I know that is not unusual in a lot of other countries, but in Sweden it is very rare.

Anyhow – since it was clear already yesterday afternoon that J would miss the ferry to Sweden, we decided to rebook our tickets. Luckily we both had bought rebookable tickets. So now, instead of starting our trip to Norway, J is on a camping place close to Bremen organizing the car and I’m at home cleaning my apartment (and writing my blog). But nothing bad happens without anything good tagging along. J and I can now finalize the last things before the trip without any stress and I can take care of the things he missed when he had to rush for the ferry. We were given an extra 24 hours for preparations. We will lose 24 hours of our trip, but that can be handled with some re-planning.

If I would give anyone one advice in how to make the most out of a trip it is to do a plan and research the place you are going to. If you don’t have the time – use a local organizer to take care of those things. I usually do the later. But in this case we did all the planning and research ourselves.

One of the things we learned in our research is that a lot of roads in Norway are toll roads. An easy way of handling this is to get a Visitors pass and connect a credit card to the license plate of the car. Then you can drive the “Autopass” lane which makes things easier and faster.

Another tip to make things smoother is to get a Camping card so that the check-in on all the camping places will be quicker and also a little bit cheaper. I have also downloaded the latest map to my GPS for some support in our search for camping places nearby.

As a result of the delay I have finished my packing one day before the start of my trip. One odd thing hit me – I don’t have a lot of nice clothes with me, but plenty of hiking and sporting clothes AND technical equipment. I actually ended up taking one extra bags for running shoes, 2 cameras, computer, GPS, power cables and other cables that are needed for these things. I seem to become less and less girly but more and more practical the older I get. Is this a good development I wonder?! ;-)