Kristiansand; Sunday, 01 June, 2025

After a final breakfast I checked out of the hotel and wandered down to the bus station in a brief break in the showers that had been passing through since early morning. Thankfully the bus was already there and waiting so I was able to board before the next hefty shower passed through a couple of minutes before departure.

The service set off as normal and headed on it’s 4 hours journey towards Oslo, though little did I know at this point that this would become a much longer, and much more expensive journey that I was expecting.

About an hour into the journey, we were running about 10 minutes adrift of the schedule as we were stopping at every stop to pick up passengers, but I’d built a good 90-minutes buffer into my journey so that wasn’t going to be a problem.

Except it pretty soon became obvious it was, as kilometre after kilometre the bus dawdled along is slow moving traffic. There were never any roadworks, other than long term ones that were already accounted for and no accidents or incidents on the road – just long queues and very slow going.

We reached Torp, some 100Km south of Oslo about the same time as we should have been pulling into the bus station in the city, and by now the Vy App was updating our arrival time to long past the last point I could still make it out to the airport before bag drop closed at 16:10.

A little while further down the road, as the app ticked the arrival time round to 15:30, the same time as the last Flytoget to the airport that would make the flight departed from the railway station 10 minutes’ walk from the bus station, and it was clear that there was no hope of making the flight I fired up the SAS and Norwegian apps and had a check on pricing, and with a searing pain in my wallet as I added nearly 25% to the overall cost of the entire trip, I booked the 20:20 SAS flight back to Heathrow.

20 minutes later my decision was affirmed as the driver pulled off the motorway and into a truck stop as he had to have an unplanned driver change, as he would have run out of hours before he reached Oslo. That added an extra 10-minutes delay, but by now the longer the delay, the less time I had to kill at the airport – and the opportunity to have a quick comfort break, around the same time I should originally have been arriving into Oslo city centre, wasn’t missed.

The bus continued its slow pace, hitting more and more traffic until about 30Km outside of the city where the bus lanes finally started and he was able to fly past the still sluggish traffic, eventually pulling into the bus station exactly 2 hours behind schedule, and 8 minutes after bag drop at Oslo Airport had closed.

From the bus station I wandered over to the central station and, almost mockingly, caught a train straight away that got me to Oslo airport, as you could probably guess, at 17:10.

The rest of the journey back was smooth, with the new flight leaving bang on time and even arriving a couple of minutes early into Heathrow.