Went all the way to Londontown...

...to keep going all the way to Ålesund, Norway.  Our flight left London's Stansted airport (not the most convenient but the bargain tickets on RyanAir were worth it) mid-afternoon and arrived at Oslo Torp (again, not the "real" Oslo airport but hey, the tickets were only twenty bucks) about 15 minutes early.  Our plan was to take a train from Oslo Torp to Oslo Gardermoen, the main airport and what we had started calling "real Oslo."  We bought some lunch at the little airport shop and figured out that the train station was actually just a platform in the middle of the countryside, and we were supposed to wait at the airport until the shuttle would take us to the platform just before the train would arrive. Ninety minutes later, we hopped on the half-full shuttle and were driven 5 minutes around the corner to a parking lot with a train track going by, reminiscent of a commuter train to Manhattan from a small town in Connecticut.  We waited, waited, and waited some more, until there was still no train 35 minutes after its scheduled arrival time. Hmmm.  Unlike the small Connecticut town, the shuttle driver had stayed with us and was now speaking furiously into his cell phone.  Well, maybe it wasn't furiously, but we couldn't understand anything and it sounded bad.  Seems the train was not running because of the snow, and Shuttle Man was going to arrange for a taxi to come to take us to another station.  Some nice Norwegian women in their early twenties explained this all to us, and finally a taxi did show up that would accomodate all thirteen of us.  This so-called Maxi Taxi would take us from Fake Oslo to downtown Oslo, where we could get another train to Real Oslo airport.  While the girls were explaining this to us, our other travellers, a bunch of guys who looked as though they hadn't slept all night, ran into the Maxi Taxi and helped themselves to the best seats.  Nice.  The guys were all spread out in different rows, legs splayed and bags all over the place, so we all had to sit mixed in with them.  Sam and I squeezed into the back row next to two idiots who were talking music our driver, Lady Gaga.  With the club music cranked to aftermarket-soundsystem-only levels, we were on the party bus from hell.