Christmas adventures in Norway and Germany

I know you have to be asking yourself, "what sane person visits Norway in December?" Well, after our five days spent freezing our butts off, I was asking myself the same question.

Here's the deal: at five months pregnant, I wasn't about to fly the 12 hours to Texas. Sorry families, but it ain't gonna happen. So. What to do for Christmas? Again the pregnancy thing came into play - I gave myself a 2-hour fly time radius from The Hague. Looking at the geography, I wasn't really going to get much warmer in that amount of time so, I thought, why not have a white Christmas?

The Norway idea came when I saw a package tour to visit "Santa's Village." Okay, I thought, Miles is getting old enough to know who Santa is, the kids would be about his age and there's a pool at the hotel. How cold could it be?

Well, my friends, the answer to that is VERY F'ING COLD! Even the Norwegians, who are bread for that weather, were like "oh ja, it's cold aright. Coldest it's been in years." The temperature at it's lowest: -39 degrees Celsius. At -40 degrees, Fahrenheit and Celsius meet, for crying out loud. It's damn cold no matter what scale you're using.

When the place you're going to provides the cold weather gear because nothing you could possibly buy in your home climate could ever be warm enough - that's a bad sign. But this is only the first in our little series of misadventures.

First hurtle to overcome: Miles woke up the morning of our trip with a little puffiness around his eyes. Hm, I thought, that's strange. No fever. We go. Throughout the flight and the rest of the day into night, his eyes proceed to almost swell shut. We start calling him quasi-Miles and limit the amount of close up pictures we take of our strange swollen child. Luckily, one of the women on the tour with us turned out to be a Doctor! Hallelujah! She had some antihistamines with her and he slowly got better over the next day or two. We have no idea what caused that (probably a rare allergy?).

Second hurtle: The website for this idyllic little tour stated that there is a bus transfer to the hotel; we'll show a movie for the kids. A movie. Okay, I thought, two hours on the bus. I can handle that. The bus trip took 4 and a half hours!!! It was out in the middle of freaking' nowhere, 10 miles from the
nearest town.

Third hurdle: We elected to stay in apartments outside of the hotel for the extra space. No one mentioned that they were 200 meters away from the place where we were to eat all our meals, see everyone else and do everything. Two hundred meters is a lot when it's cold enough to freeze your nose off just for stepping outside! Plus, the night we got there, the apartment didn't have a working heater. Or a phone. Had to trudge all the way up to the hotel lodge just to complain. Fun.

Fourth and final hurdle (thank god): Through a series of miscommunication, few of the activities were organized well. It was a lot of hurry up and wait. That's bad when you're wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy and are melting all over the place. Plus the cold eliminated or curtailed a lot of the stuff like dog sledding, snowmobiling, ice fishing etc. Aaron did manage to go snowmobiling and missed covering an inch on his neck and got frostbite, for crying out loud. Yes, he's fine now, but come on! Then we went on a sleigh ride in complete darkness. Only 6 hours of daylight, thank you very much.

There were good things about this place. For one, it was really beautiful! Pristine wilderness, a frozen lake, the whole thing was gorgeous! Second, although it was dreadfully cold, every day was sunny and clear. Third, they had the best indoor pool I've ever seen! Thank god, because that's what saved us every day. Finally, there were only 5 families on this tour with lots of kids Miles' age. He had an absolute blast playing with them every day. Didn't even care about anything else!

So, to sum up: overall we had a good time. Never going back. Even in the summer.

We have taken one other trip that we highly recommend: Aachen, Germany! Right over the border from The Netherlands, they have annual Christmas markets that are not to be missed! But what really made the trip great was that we stayed with a family there that we met through an international organization called Servas. This puts people in touch with one another to spread peace through personal connection. I guess the theory is you can't stereotype people if you actually get to know them! There are hosts in almost any city you can think of and it tells you where they live, how many travelers they want, if they have kids, interests, etc. (That's me, the pregnant marshmallow in the pic on the left.)

Anyway, they were wonderful and showed us around their town like we were their family and not someone they just met. We ate like kings, shared recipes, and really had a great time. It didn't even matter that it rained every day because we were busy with them! We even made time for the zoo - and, while not first class, it has a lot of things for kids to play on (see climbing wall on right)! Even their 13-year-old was super nice and patient and played with Miles the whole time. We were only there for three days, but I would go back in a heartbeat!

I'm glad that we had both experiences as we learned a lot from both. One lesson: go with Servas - it's a lot cheaper! Plus you can use Google Maps to find out exactly where it is! But not all was bad in Norway and I'll try to only remember the good parts.

Hoping you have Happy Holidays and a Wonderful New Year!

Love
Nicole