20260603-20260604 Wednesday June 3 to Thursday June 4, 2026. Heading to Norway for Viking Neptune Norway to Iceland Cruise
We begin another travel adventure today with a shuttle ride to Sea-Tac airport, but this time with friends. Mark and Jan, who have been long time friends, decided to join our former neighbors Doug and Sandy on a Viking Neptune cruise from Norway to Iceland. Mark and Jan rode in the airport shuttle with us today, while Doug and Sandy had left several days earlier to visit family in Sweden and tour Copenhagen before the start of the Norway Cruise.
Mark and Jan were flying on a different airline, so we parted at the airport curb to head our separate ways to our flights. We will all end up meeting up on the Viking Neptune on Friday June 5, although Doug and Sandy will start their Norway trip in Oslo and take the scenic train from Oslo to Bergen a day before we arrive in Oslo. Mark and Jan will fly directly into Bergen a day earlier to spend an extra day exploring Bergen.
Our Lufthansa flights left out of the South Satellite, which had a business class lounge called the Club at SEA. This was conveniently adjacent to our boarding gate, but the lounge was small, crowded, dirty and showing its age badly with sagging, damaged chair cushions and ailing facilities including a broken coffee machine, so no espresso or coffee was available. They did have sandwiches and Thai themed hot food including fried rice, curry soup and tofu curry, but the food was pretty lack luster and the snacks were very limited in variety. This lounge would only earn a 2 star rating. But we did appreciate being able to get lunch there before our flight.
We flew from Seattle to Frankfurt and then from Frankfurt to Oslo on Lufthansa Airlines. The business class seats in the Lufthansa Airbus A320 were not as nice as the business class seats on Delta Airlines Boeing 777, but they did lie flat and we did manage a few hours of sleep during our red-eye flights which left Seattle in the afternoon and arrived in Frankfurt the following morning. The A320’s seats had 220vac power with universal outlets on the seat bases, but lacked any USB power ports. We had not packed AC power bricks in our carry on luggage or backpacks, so we were not able to keep our devices charged, although a flight attendant did charge Ben’s iPhone while he slept with a charger at her workstation. There were also no air vents in the business class cabin that could be adjusted for comfort. The flight was a bit too warm and stuffy for us. There was also an infant that periodically made her unhappiness known to everyone in the business class section during ascent and descent, as well as once or twice during the flight. That little tike had some lungs on her, able to overpower the noise cancelling headsets.
Food service on the flight was OK with a dinner and breakfast service. The quality of the meal was a bit below Delta’s business class and far below Emirates business class, but satisfactory for our flight. The blinds were drawn early in the flight and most of the flight was spent with the lights dimmed so passengers could get a few hours of sleep. The flight was just under 9 hours in duration from Seattle to Frankfurt. Ben watched “The Bride”, which was an interesting new take on the Bride of Frankenstein, before powering down for a couple hours of sleep.
We had transited through Frankfurt before, and it is quite notable for having lots of mandatory stairs even when planes can dock directly to the terminal building. The last time we transited through Frankfurt, we unloaded on the tarmac via air stairs and had to ride a bus for a very long time to get to the terminal complex. Today, we docked right at the main terminal building but had to immediately climb a long flight of stairs from the jetway to the terminal main floor.
Upon arrival into the EU (Germany being a member state) we had to do a biometric registration with a new Entry Exit system, which ties your passport to a photograph and fingerprints. There are self service kiosks scattered throughout the terminal and there was a brief video played on the plane explaining this new process. After stopping at the kiosks to have your passport scan, photo and fingerprint registration, you still have to go through immigrations as well, but the process didn’t take more than a couple of minutes.
Our checked bags were checked through to Oslo, so there was no need to collect our bags.
The business class lounge at Frankfurt was much nicer than the Club at SEA. Janet most appreciated the candy jars containing gummy bears and other candies. They also had a real espresso bar manned by real baristas so Ben was able to get his espresso fix in.
While in the lounge, Janet ran into a couple with Viking luggage tags on their luggage and she discovered they were from Anacortes and also boarding the Viking Neptune, but were flying into Bergen.
Also while we were in the lounge, we noticed a huge emergency vehicle response with a huge parade of ambulances, fire engines and other emergency vehicles racing toward the far end of the terminal building from us.
We hadn’t realized that there are a couple of Lufthansa Business class lounges in the airport, and that the lounge we stopped at was a long ways from our gate, which wasn’t assigned until an hour or two after our arrival.
It wasn’t until we walked the length of the terminal building that we found out what the emergency response was all about. A Boeing 787 at gate A15 had its nose gear collapse, dropping the nose of the plane onto the tarmack.
There was no fire or explosion, but there certainly were a lot of emergency vehicles blocking the taxiway.
While this was not our plane, our plane was trapped by the emergency vehicles blocking the taxiway, so our flight was delayed a bit while they found a spare plane parked out on a more remote part of the airport and then loaded us onto buses and drove us out to get on the spare plane. They also had to refuel the plane and transfer all the luggage and flight crew.
This A320 neo was a pretty old and run down plane with no real business class seating. The so-called business class was just economy class seats where the middle seats were left unassigned, but the seat pitch and padding were awful. There were no power outlets or entertainment screens at all. Fortunately, it was a short flight from Frankfurt to Oslo.
After collecting our bags, we were directed towards customs, but if you didn’t have anything like animals or produce to declare, you walked right though to the exit, where our Viking representatives were waiting for us.
We were shuttled in a small 8 passenger Sprinter van which barely had enough room for the luggage for the 40 minute drive from the airport to downtown Oslo.
The Radisson Blu Plaza hotel, where Viking was putting us up, is a business class hotel within easy walking distance to the train station where we will be taking the scenic train from Oslo to Bergen on Saturday. Unfortunately, there is a huge major construction project going up across the street which makes the hotel entry look like a disaster zone, and the noise of the construction with jack hammers and heavy equipment are terrible. It was also raining pretty hard when we arrived, adding to the noise and confusion.
The hotel room itself is modern, functional and clean. The elevators are computerized like the ones on the Sun Princess where you enter which floor you wish to go to on a touch screen, and tap your room card. The screen then tells you which elevator to take.
We got up to the room about 6:30pm. By the time we had gotten our chargers unpacked and set up, jet lag was hitting Janet pretty good so she hit the sack early. The rain had stopped about 7:30pm and there was still an hour or two of daylight, so Ben walked from the train station to the Grand Hotel, Norwegian Parliament building, and the Oslo City Hall, which were a 20-30 minute walk from the Radisson Blu Plaza hotel.
Tomorrow morning, breakfast starts at 6:30am, and our Oslo bus tour starts at 8:45am.
