Our trip to Tromsø — Day 1
On the first day, we didn’t do a lot other than get to our hotel, walk around in town a bit, and eat dinner at Nyt.
Getting from the Tromsø airport to our hotel
We arrived at Tromsø airport at around 15 after having flown directly from Copenhagen. After having picked up our luggage, we started walking toward the exit to take a taxi to our hotel. On the way out, we noticed there was also an Airport Express bus that went from the airport to several hotels in the city.
Airport Express versus Taxi
When we compared prices, it turned out to be cheaper for us (two children and two adults) to take a taxi, so that’s what we ended up doing. For couples it might be a better option to take the Airport Express bus. The Airport Express bus is a service from the company Best Arctic, which also arranges a number of tours around Tromsø. More information on the Airport Express bus, including schedule and prices, can be found at https://www.bussring.no/bussring-airport-express/. To see a version of the webpage in another language than Norwegian, click the Translate option in the menu on the top of the page. If you have resized your browser window to a smaller size than full screen, the menu options might not appear at the top. Instead, they can be found by clicking the button with three horizontal lines in the upper left corner of the webpage.
Our hotel, the Scandic Ishavshotel Tromsø
We stayed at the Scandic Ishavshotel in Tromsø (https://www.scandichotels.dk/hoteller/norge/tromso/scandic-ishavshotel) in a “Standard Family Three” room, which is a room with a double bed and a bunk bed, with a lower bunk for one child and an upper bunk for another child, where the bunk bed folds out from the wall. We have previously stayed in hotels with these types of bunk beds, and neither kid likes to sleep in the top bunk, so we moved the mattress from the top bunk to between the double bed and the window, and instead used the top bunk to store some of our luggage. While this arrangement was good for sleeping, it decreased the floor space in the room from very little to almost none.
The location of the hotel was very central, both in terms of short walking distances to restaurants, the main street, and various museums in Tromsø. It was also one of the common pick-up locations for most tours.
Our room faced the harbor in Tromsø which afforded spectacular views across the fjord, to the mountains on the other side, as well as a chance to follow along with activity around the ships docked in the harbor.
We tried to spot the Northern Lights from our room every night, but without luck. This was probably largely due to the late onset of darkness when we visited, as we were too tired to wait for complete darkness. Fortunately, we were very lucky to see an amazing display of Northern Lights on the night that we went on a Northern Lights chase on Day 3 of our trip.
Afternoon and dinner at Nyt
After having checked into the hotel and unpacked a bit, we went out and walked around the town a bit, and looked for a place to have dinner. We had read good reviews of a pizza restaurant, Casa Inferno, which we wanted to try. Unfortunately, it was fully booked. We quickly found other options that looked good, for example an Asian restaurant, but it turned out to be closed during the Easter holiday. In the end, we found Nyt (https://mackbar.no/en/nyt-en/), located quite centrally in a small side street off the main walking street. The waiters were very welcoming and our food arrived quickly and was delicious. After dinner, we headed back to the hotel.
Summary
I hope this description of the first day of our trip to Tromsø can help if you are planning, or considering planning, a trip to Tromsø. We spent some time at the airport comparing prices of different ways of getting to the city center, and we were a bit worried about whether the hotel room would be big enough for the four of us, knowing that the kids usually don’t like bunk beds. I hope this post can help when planning or upon arriving in Tromsø.
You might also be interested in going to the post giving an overview of our trip to Tromsø, which also includes links to more details of each day we were there.
