The tent

So, about our checked bag. Our first KLM/Air France flight from Boston to Paris CDG was late and we missed our Paris-Amsterdam connection. An Air France agent rebooked us on a flight several hours later and assured us that our bag would be transferred as well (as she ripped up the original boarding passes including the bag check sticker). A couple of long layovers later, we were in Bergen and our bag was not. We gave KLM our info, and stressed repeatedly that we were only going to be in Bergen for one night and we really wanted them to just keep the bag at the airport when they found it, since we only had very vague ideas of where we were going to be after the night in Bergen but figured we probably wouldn't have made it too far and could just pop back around to grab it.

12 hours after arrival: No update to the KLM tracker site, so we get the rental car, hang out in Bergen a bit and come up with a short-term plan. The first place we'd intended to go was Trolltunga, so I do a kayak search and find the cabin in Røldal, which is further south than we'd planned to go but good enough for winging it last minute.  

36 hours after arrival: Still no info on bag, so we book another night at Håradalen, do some migraine recovery work on Cam and hike it out.

Migraine beans

60 hours after arrival: KLM's tracking website now has the bag as "out for delivery" with no other information, which is both auspicious and troubling since we'd asked them to keep it at the airport. We make several phone calls to KLM that give us a whole mess of contradictory information. The general vague consensus, from the subset of agents that seem to be able to find out anything about it at all, is that our bag is probably out for delivery, probably to our poor airbnb host in Bergen despite our repeated requests that they hold it at the airport, that the courier should have already contacted us but we'd probably hear from them soon, and that it's impossible to get in touch with the courier to redirect them back to the airport so tough shit. At one point they request the next address we'd be at so we quickly google a hotel near Gudvangen, the next day's destination. But we continue to insist that, if it comes back to the airport, it be kept there. 

The last agent that I talk to this day is a particularly vile mansplaining French turd who says, essentially, that we should be enormously grateful that they had somehow managed, against all odds, to find our bag at all without our bag check sticker and that if we do not intercept the bag at our airbnb host's address in Bergen it will almost certainly be lost forever. I mean, I may not be a professional travel logistician but I am pretty sure this is not at all how it works. But we are nervous and in need of some straight answers from actual in-person humans, so after some frantic correspondence with our saintly airbnb host (who, despite her busy lawyer life, gives KLM all her contact info at work and assures us that she'll somehow manage to intercept the bag if it arrives at her home), we take off for the Bergen airport.  

The only 15 min of rain of the whole trip

69 hours after arrival: At the Bergen airport, we're told by one KLM representative (who then, conveniently, promptly disappears forever) that our bag had actually shipped out for Gudvangen that morning.  We call the Gudvangen hotel, they don't have our bag.  Then a second KLM representative at the airport calls literally all of the couriers and none of them actually has our bag or has ever had our bag.  So, unable to revise the status of our bag from found to not found, a yet third KLM representative opens up a second lost bag ticket.  At this point (and actually still to date) our bag is in the KLM system as both delivered and at large.  Determined not to let any of this bag fuckery screw anything up more than it already had, we set off for Gudvangen.

83 hours after arrival: I receive a strange email from someone named Javed claiming to have our bag in his car and wondering what time we will be at home to get our bag. We're slightly confused but elated. After stopping in at Nordic Adventures to make kayaking arrangements, we give Javed the Nordic Adventures address and let him know that the bag can be delivered here at any point this day.

88 hours after arrival: After kayaking, we receive a post-it message from Javed that the bag will arrive at 4:35 across the street from Nordic Adventures. We settle in and watch the cars and buses go by. For hours. We try to call and email Javed to no avail. Finally at around 7 he answers one of our calls: Evidently the bag is no longer, in fact, in his car, as he had put it on a Bergen-Sogndal bus and just assumed that we would intuit that from his shitty message. And of course this possibility never even remotely occurred to us (or to the British Nordic Adventurer that took the message): to our TSA-addled minds, the idea of approaching a bus driver to ask for a random black duffel bag that someone else put in the luggage hold is so sketchy as to be unthinkable.  Anyway, the bag is now maybe in Sogndal, or maybe somewhere else, but the Sogndal bus station is closed so nothing for it but to drive to Besseggen and sleep in the Yaris in the Gjendesheim parking lot and hope that they figure it all out in the morning.

Fat-thumbing in the Yaris, only sort of holding it together

110 hours after arrival: We're maybe a quarter of the way through the Besseggen ascent when my phone rings. I briefly hear what sounded like Megan, the British Nordic Adventurer, before our mobile wifi cuts out for the better part of the day.  Again, determined not to let the bag ruin our trip, we continue up.

114 hours after arrival: The wifi is still down. I beg the employees of the closed-for-one-more-day tourist hostel to let me use their internet-enabled desktop (giving me some real flashbacks to 1996). Nordic Adventures has our bag! There's no way we'll get there before closing so I send a quick desperate email asking them to just leave it outside their little hut when they close up.

The Laerdal tunnel, which we ended up driving through 4 times, is the longest road tunnel in the world at 24.51 km: so long that, to reduce driver fatigue or claustrophobia, it has several of these bizarre caverns where the tunnel briefly opens up into this super trippy blue-light alien abduction shit and then abruptly closes down around you again

118 hours after arrival: After spending 4 hours on the road fearing the worst (not actually our bag? manhandled to death by Javed's posse? stolen by kayakers? infested with Norwegian forest cats?)¹, we are joyfully, tearfully reunited with duffel!!! But also way far away from where we need to be. So we drive, again. 

And then we stop for dinner (there will be a whole food post, or prob several, at some point).

And then after a bit more driving we tent, exhausted but triumphant.

In the end we only had one night with the tent, but my god was it gloriously comfortable. I crawled in, mumbled some incomprehensible words of gratitude to Cam, and then passed out so hard.

The other side of our campsite: the Norwegians all seem to have this compulsive rock-stacking tic, based on the ubiquity of these road-side cairns and also watching all the Norwegian hikers subconsciously stacking and re-stacking pebbles with one hand while hanging out and eating their tomato mackerel

¹ We found out after the fact that Nordic Adventures came perilously close to putting the duffel back on the Bergen-Sogndal bus when our wifi cut out on the mountain, but Megan talked them out of it. Megan is THE BEST.