Norway Part 1 - NYC to Ålesund in Magical Realism

This entry is about events that happened in August of 2021, about a month after I went to Russia, got COVID, got stuck. (Obviously summer 2021 was a bit of a different time in terms of COVID restrictions and before the current situation in Ukraine as well, seems obvious but maybe important to note.)

Entries here if you are interested:
Locked Up Abroad: Russia #1 / Russia #2 / Russia #3

Looking at my titles I was probably being overdramatic but it felt dramatic at the time. I remember I had such high hopes at the time of resuming normal life and travel after getting the vaccine, but then this happening right out of the gate just felt like a bitch slap for thinking life would ever be the same. I just wanted to get back to a routine, regroup and recover for a while.

But in my pre-Russia / post-vax optimism I had made another commitment, one that was also tough to get out of. A television program about the work and life of the people who work on holiday yachts was launching its first cold water franchise and a casting scout reached out to me. After some zoom interviews with two casting people, it seemed like a good fit and I was asked to put together a group of cold water swimmers to come as my guests. The guests had to have American passports which sadly ruled out my closest swimming friends, but I invited a few swim friends, mostly from a group who did a swim in NYC on my 40th birthday so I thought it would be a nice group. Everyone else did their interviews too, the casting people put together a video cut together a video from our interviews and photos and things, sent it to production and we were approved to book. We had to find dates that worked for everyone and settled on the second week of August

In terms of costs, there was a charter fee which was not insubstantial but well within my usual vacation budget especially considering I hadn’t traveled at all for 18 months. So I covered the charter fee and just asked my guests to chip in towards the tip for the crew at the end of our trip which I thought was fair, especially since the show was covering our airfare and hotel and food and stuff before and after the cruise.

All of this happened back in Spring of 2021 and to be honest we weren’t really sure it would actually happen until about a week before the trip. COVID restrictions at the time were very back and forth and Norway itself was still closed to tourists. But because we were filming for a show, production was able to get us work visas to enter the country, with the condition we had to arrive in Norway 4 days earlier than expected to quarantine before the charter itself, and take 2 PCR and 1 rapid COVID tests before departing. We took the first PCR test a few days before we had to leave and they were both negative. One more PCR test 48-hours before boarding, again neg, then one more test, a rapid one, the day we flew out. All negative.

The production staff was not the most organized and we didn’t get our airline tickets until a day or two before our flight. When the tickets arrived, my name was spelled incorrectly which was a massive pain, production kept saying it was fixed but it was not, so I had to arrive hours early to the airport to fix it in person. Stressful, but it worked out. Flight was uneventful and we met up with some of our party at the connection in Oslo, and the rest when we landed in Ålesund.

At the Ålesund airport we had mandatory rapid tests by the government. This was very well organized and we had the results back minutes after everyone retrieved their luggage. But going through customs, we hit our first snag. The Norwegian government had a legal requirement that only people from the same household could share a hotel room during their quarantine and were checking our hotel reservations to confirm this. This was a problem because while we had 2 couples from the same households who were okay to share a room, the other 2 sets of 2 people were not from the same household (or even same city/state) and production had booked them to share rooms. Because this requirement was not met, we waited around the airport for an hour or two while production sorted it, and finally they emailed everyone hotel confirmations for their separate room bookings and the officials let us leave.

We got in our van and drove from the airport to our hotel. The local area was really stunning, really beautiful nature perched on hills above the fjiords and a cute little town with fun looking shops and restaurants and a tiny lighthouse on the harbour. The hotel they had booked into was super nice too, situated right on the water and a nice mix of rustic and modern. However…when we checked into the rooms we realized that production had not booked extra rooms for non-household members to quarantine separately, they had just forged two additional hotel confirmations to make it look like they had done the necessary. This seemed shady as heck but we were at a bit of a loss as to what else to do except go along with it.

Last updated April 29, 2023