Just about five weeks to go...

My wife Claire and I will have been married 30 years on 22nd September 2009 and to celebrate, we plan to go to Norway for a week and cross the Arctic circle when we are there. Our hope is to see the Aurora Borealis as we will be up north at the Autumn Equinox and just before the long polar night which lasts about five months. We are inspired by Joanna Lumley who did a really lovely programme, "Joanna Lumley in the Land of the Northern Lights" on BBC TV some time ago about her own trip to northern Norway to see the Aurora. Her view was very moving and worked wonders for the Norwegian tourist industry!

On 15th September we will be flying from Dublin to what Ryanair calls Oslo, but in keeping with that airline's tradition is nowhere near Oslo - it's actually at a place called Torp! After a night in the city we then move on by train to Trondheim and there change onto the sleeper to Bodø. It is on this leg that we cross the Arctic Circle sometime in the early hours of the morning.

We will spend a night in Bodø before flying even further north to Tromsø on the 18th. It is there that we might see the Aurora. On the 20th we fly to Oslo (main airport this time!) We are hiring a car there to take us to Geilo where we will be staying in a lovely mountain refuge - called the Dr Holms Hotel. Appropriate as, to use my title, I am Dr Holmes (Viking ancestors, you know)! (Dr Holm was a Norwegian chest physician who opened the hotel in 1909 for his patients at a time when there was no useful medication for tuberculosis and the only treatment was fresh air and a good diet. During the German occupation it was used by the Nazis in their Lebensborn programme.)

On the 23rd we leave Norway to return to Ireland.

I plan to set up a website soon to cover our experiences in "the land of the midnight sun" so watch this space! All being well, I hope to publish our holiday diary on a daily basis there as our holiday progresses.