To the arctic wastes and back!

Holiday booking is way too stressful. Although to be honest, my main problem is being indecisive and a control freak.

I decided I'd see the northern Lights. And Tromsø, Norway appealed. Other fun things like dog sledding, and whale watching seemed like they might be fun. Looked for organised tours. They exist but seem rather expensive. £1000 seems a bit much for a 3 day tour. But I can sort this out myself

Next issue is when to go. I'm a bit limited here. Flights only happen on Tuesday and Saturday. I want to keep a weekend before Christmas, so went for Tuesday. That one gets back at the unpleasant time of stupid o'clock. Just before midnight. Add baggage collection/passport/train/walk time - I'm not a fan of getting back at 2am.

So what I can do and for very little extra, is stop off in another city.  Was hoping Stavanger since I know someone there, but there are no direct flights there from Tromsø. Seriously, it's like Tromsø is a tiny little place in the arctic circle or something. Maybe I can stop at Bergen, or Oslo for a night.

This is a lot harder than it should be.

Followup: Norway planned at last.

I usually book flights and hotels with Expedia.co.uk. I've had good customer experience with them in the past. Sadly, expedia didn't have any hotels with single rooms, so I went to Booking.com. They did but they only do hotels. So that meant I'd need to do two different bookings.

As I said, there are only 2 flights from Tromsø each week. I didn't want the Saturday one because I'd rather have at least one weekend at home before Christmas, and 3 days didn't seem enough so I considered the Tuesday one. That gets back to Gatwick at 23:50! Add train travel to the end and I'd be getting in at 2am. A 2-stop route via Oslo wasn't much more expensive but if I do that then I might as well have a look at Oslo, so I tried to find a way to add a stopover via any popular flight booking website. They wouldn't let me. So I tried doing a multi-stop instead.

It seems that flights that exist as singles don't exist as multi-stops. But the travel websites never tell you which flights need to be changed. Decided to give up and book three separate flights directly with Norwegian Air Shuttle.

Still, I finally managed to book my three flights, and two hotels, so that's that out of the way. I just need to plan what I'm actually going to do when I'm there.