The One stuck in Nogland

The day the girl and I flew back from Aus we went straight into work. This seemed like a reasonable idea at the time (especially after we secured business seats) until after catching up on a few emails I got called into the bosses office. "Norway wants you to fly over tonight" was her opening statement and I could see she was reluctant to force me to go. Not really thinking it through I decided to leave my comfy bed for a couple more days and headed for Norway.

This turned out to be a critical error as the day I landed that unpronouncable Icelandic volcano, blew its muffin top. Not realising the impact to my next couple of weeks I found it mildly amusing that I was stuck in Norway with barely a change of clothes and not much on the agenda. The next day it was brought to my attention that our offshore crew was stuck in London with no way to get over to the boat that was moored in the North of Norway. About this time the cogs in my brain were starting to grind and I realised that we would probably have to be the likely candidates to reach the boat.

This didn't really worry me until we realised how big Norway was and that the flights here were also grounded. "No problem," said our accomodating hosts, "we have hired a bus for you to get up there."

And so began our lengthy bus ride from Stavanger to Kristiansund. To add to our misery 2 clients were added to the passenger list. We later found out that ironically both drivers were themselves from Iceland. Fortunately they had a sense of humour about it all.

We got about halfway when we stopped for some water at a nearby creek. I decided to get out of the bus and was greeted by some exceptionally cold snow. I only lasted outside the bus long enough to notice that a hose had broken and the water they were refilling was spewing out under the bus. Another stop for a couple of hours while this was fixed was certainly not appreciated.

We continued the rest of the journey without much more drama to finally reach the vessel some 20hrs later. Once we arrived there I was greeted by a 12hr night shift in which a blizzard had decided to keep our morale at all time lows.