Nuuk; Monday, 25 May, 2026

As there wouldn’t be any time to do anything before my bus back to the airport, I had a bit of a lie in and a lazy breakfast before heading back to my room and packing.

I’d just finished checking to make sure I had everything and was about to head to checkout when the receptionist knocked on my door to say that the bus was early and was outside waiting for me, so I quickly grabbed everything handed her my keycard and headed for the bus.

It spent about 15 minutes wandering around the streets of Nuuk making a couple of pickups before heading over to the airport, arriving at little after 10:15, 2½ hours before my departure time, which of course meant I had a very smooth journey through the airport as there was virtually nobody else around.

Thankfully there is a large departures lounge area on the upper floor of the terminal away from the cramped gate area with lots of tables and power points, so I was able to spend the time getting caught up before it was time to head down to the gate and start the journey back home.

Whilst I’d gained on the way out with three of the five hours travel time being cancelled out by time zone changes, the payback was on the return journey with the whole of the afternoon scheduled to be wiped out with the flight landing only 5 hours after departure, but 8 hours later in Copenhagen than the time back in Nuuk.

Boarding started a little early, which was good as it was an almost totally full flight, despite their being another flight to Copenhagen only two hours before ours, but the ground team were really efficient and an Airbus A330 was fully loaded, closed up and ready to go a couple of minutes ahead of our scheduled departure.

Pretty much on time we pushed back from the gate taxied to the very end of the quite short runway with the captain making sure the engines were close to full power before releasing the break and sending us down the runway, rotating with a couple of hundred meters of runway left.

The departure was out over the fjords before turning inland, which meant I was able to see quite a bit of the route that we’d taken the previous day to the Icefjord and Bird Rock as well as several other glaciers all gently carving before the cloud cover obscured the rest of Greenland with only occasional breaks revealing parts of Iceland and finally clearing as we crossed over southern Norway heading down in towards the Danish capital.

Sadly the smooth journey came to a screeching halt on arrival into Copenhagen, despite the plane landing 15 minutes ahead of schedule it took nearly 90 minutes for the first bags to make it to the baggage belt, and it was through the two hour mark before my bags arrived and there were still plenty of people waiting, some looking nervously at onward connecting boarding passes.

Thankfully, once I had my bag, it was only a couple of minutes’ walk to my hotel for the night and pretty soon I was in my room and ready to go to bed.