I will be taking the full five fifths - plus some extra

Badger near death in Lapland 

The redoubtable esbboston has suggested that one should take at least a fifth of one’s favourite alcoholic beverage to ease the pain of freezing to death in an icy cold environment.

As one who has damn near done that  – and now knows what it would feel like – I can assure esb that I will be taking a lot more than a fifth with me – it will be more like five fifths – and I will have a hip flask of Jameson wherever I go.

And as I have said before, I have been studying assiduously the survival skills of Bear Grylls and now know how to cut open and gut a reindeer to crawl inside it to keep warm, how to make a fire by rubbing two antlers over a pile of dried peat, how to outrun a polar bear – well you can’t actually outrun a Polar bear - you have to be able to run faster than the people you are with - and I have been training hard every day - stuff like that.

The harder thing on this occasion will be to survive the prices in Norway which everybody says – and from what I can see so far have no doubt is true – is the most expensive country on the planet.

This is another reason to take alcohol – particularly on the boat. The boat people have taken the trouble to publish the prices they charge for drinks – I imagine so that they prevent people from going into a catatonic state and needing medical treatment when they get their first bar bill.

You can get a glass of wine from £7.70 ($12) or a bottle of wine from £37 ($57). A glass of beer on the other hand is a snip at £6.60 ($10).

At those prices I am guessing there will not be any chance of us getting drunk and falling overboard.  

I loathe monasteries and castles

Berlin - Reichstag

I do things much more slowly and carefully these days because I have been responsible for some colossal cock ups  - some of which I have admitted to in my blogs – and a couple of which were so awful that I have never confessed to anyone - simply because they were so FUBAR as to defy the imagination. 

I will only say that it is not possible to leave a place before you have arrived in it - and to try to do so can be expensive in terms of air fares and pre-paid hotels - and that if you get the checking out date of your hotel wrong you may find your belongings in Glad bags in the hotel cellar when you try to return to your room late at night.

So now I do spreadsheets and work slowly and carefully  through the issues – which does not always guarantee success because Cate gives me some significant challenges.

These will usually involve tacking a seemingly impossible task onto an already difficult problem – but the trap will not be sprung until I am well into the planning stages and she will say – ‘and by the way I want to go to the Benedictine Monastery in Plob’.

Plob of course will be nowhere near where we are going so I will need to develop a cunning plan to get us to Plob and back on track – bearing in mind that there are planes, trains and automobiles already involved – and that bookings have already been made.

And when we get to the Benedictine Monastery at Plob it will look – to me – like every other Benedictine Monastery I have ever seen in my life – and I have seen possibly 10,000 – just as every castle looks much the same to me – but Cate will savour every morsel of it and will take lots of pictures – and that’s all that really matters. I loathe castles.

Kirkenes Snow Hotel

However – Norway has proved to particularly tricky as we are taking a series of planes, trains and then a boat up the coast to Kirkenes where it will be very dark and where we will be staying overnight in the Snow Hotel.

We may also see the Northern Lights which we missed out on last year in Lapland. We will be much further North than we were last year – which hardly seems possible – but I have checked Google maps – which would not lie about something like this. 

I am not going too close to the edge this time

Jewish Memorial Berlin 

I have been up to my ears planning our trip to Norway in January so have been distracted from blogging. As you know we have this fetish about going to the coldest places on earth at the coldest times of the year in Europe - just because we come from a very hot country and now love wallowing about in snow and ice.

In Australia in the run up to Christmas the stores are full of what they think are Christmas trees and every store has a jolly Santa decked out in red and white - with a big white beard - and every store – and every shopping centre – and every car park – and every radio station – plays Christmas carols from the 1^st of October until the 25^th  December – all in the name of selling as much Christmas crap as possible.

On Christmas day – at least in the past – Australians sat down – in 40° heat – to tables groaning with mighty roasts and baked potatoes and pumpkins and traditional English puddings. Spare me!

In more recent times some sanity has crept into our behavior in Australia and we have started to realise that we are not in fact English or European and that it does not snow in Australia at Christmas and that we should actually behave like it is 40° outside – and not eat mountains of hot food.

We discovered when we got to Vienna that it is not like that at all here. There is no Santa Claus and there is not nearly as much crap as there is in Australia. The actually do have white Christmases here and do not need to spray ‘Santa Snow’ on the shop windows to try to fool people into buying their schlock. Most Viennese have not heard of Cliff Richard – do not own copies of his Christmas CDs – and do not play them endlessly in stores from October to December. It is bliss.

Now Cate and Gwenyth and I have perhaps overreacted because it is actually quite cool in Vienna and there is possibly no need for us to go to – and indeed inside the Arctic Circle – but we like to live life on the edge because - unlike some of our fellow travellers - we are of the firm view that this is all there is and we need to make the most of it.

And as my son once said to me ‘Papa – if you are not living life on the edge – you are taking up too much room.’ I think it was my son – it may have been my dealer.

I do not plan to go as close to the edge as I did last year when I fell off that damn Husky sled and broke five ribs and then collapsed with hypothermia after the reindeer sled ride before we actually collided with a reindeer on the ice covered road on the way back to our wilderness lodge where the outside temperate was -27° and if you faltered feeling your way through snow from your sleeping hut to the mess hut you died in your tracks.  

But anyway planning the Norway trip is a task that is taxing me to the limit. Cate worked on it for some months before shoveling it all over to me a week ago saying to was too hard and telling me it was now my job.

It involves boats, at least three different airplanes, three different trains and a snow hotel. The complication is that Cate won’t tell me some of the key ingredients – like everything she actually wants to do and the precise dates she wants to do them. This is so that I have a challenge to keep me busy while she is in Turkey.