Kirkenes; Thursday, 18 May, 2023

Work finished for the day we hopped in a minicab and headed over to Heathrow for the late evening flight over to Oslo.

Nearly a year ago our trip to Scandinavia got off to a slightly choppy start when the outbound flight to Stockholm was delayed by over 4 hours due to technical problems. Thankfully that wasn’t full foreshadowing, but the fact that the aircraft that was going to form our service was only just taking off on the runway above us on an outbound leg to Belfast as we went through the tunnel to Heathrow Central indicated that there was likely to be a lengthy delay.

In the end the delay was almost two hours long, and so by the time we pushed back and headed off it was pretty late, made even later as the plane was parked at a remote stand and the airstairs developed a fault that meant it took nearly 15 minutes to get them removed form the side of the plane after we were already all shut up and ready to go.

We eventually landed in Oslo just shy of two hours late and, after a thankfully quick journey through immigration and baggage reclaim, made it to the taxi rank to grab a cab round to our airport hotel for the night.