Spring Break!  Well, not yet.  Before our official travel break started we had to go to our final required excursion with the Castle staff to Madrid, Spain.  Besides the fact that the temperature would be about triple the temperature at the Castle, I had no idea what to expect from our trip to Madrid.  I was excited to see how much Spanish I remembered from my classes now that it has been about 5 years since I stopped studying the language.  The results were rather disappointing.  I remembered bits and pieces, I’d remember some words but wouldn’t be able to come up with the rest of the words to complete a sentence.  But, if we needed to find the library, I had us covered.  ¿Dónde está la biblioteca?

I came to Europe with only 1 trip in mind: I wanted to go dogsledding under the Northern Lights in Norway.  Once I had come up with the trip, I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from making this happen.  This would be the trip of a lifetime and even if I had to go by myself, I was prepared for it, but somehow I found two castle-dwellers crazy enough to enter the Arctic Circle with me.  Planning the trip became a challenge to complete our mission for the least amount of money possible because Norway was very expensive, but we managed to finalize our plans within a price range that we deemed reasonable.  Fly from Amsterdam to
Tromsø with a quick layover in Oslo, spend a few days in Tromsø, catch an extremely early flight to Oslo and spend the day there, followed by another obnoxiously early flight home to Amsterdam.  Let’s go!