Apart from the stupidity of having to stay overnight at Stansted because you can’t get there from the North in time to chekc in for a 10.30 am flight, journey there went quite well. Note however, that the bedroom décor in the Stansted Airport Radisson hotel (and, my spies tell me, in the Oslo one too) is absolutely the most hideous assemblage of bad taste in lighting, decoration, carpets, furniture, mirrors etc etc you have ever seen. Part bad enough to be kitsch, part just demented. Who stays in these places by free choice one wonders. Anyway, Ryanair behaved itself and showed up the rocky coast of Norway nicely as we descended to Torp. Then the Telemark Express bus rolled us through golden woods and past autumnal lakes to our destination (of which more separately).
Returning, the bus ploughed through heavy rain most of the way, but Norwegian roads seem to be designed to shed water rather than retain it in puddles, so no problem. Again Ryanair did Ok and with only 40 minutes between touch-down and train departure we nonetheless made it. At this point puzzlement sets in. The Cross Country Stansted to Brimingham stopped for signals outside Stansted, waited at least 5 minutes for a platform at Cambridge, dallied at Ely and March, and yet got into Peterborough on time. Another example of the totally absurd timing practices on Britain’s railways, whereby everything is so generously timed it’s almost impossible to ruin the company statistics by being late. But realatively troule-free there and back again.
