3×5 Adventures

It’s almost time to start our big journey. We hit the road this morning at 8:30 to drive up to Dallas where we will spend the night before flying out to Dallas.

Why Dallas? While we love calling San Antonio home, it doesn’t provide great flights internationally. To get to Oslo out of San Antonio it would have been a minimum of two layovers for us. When looking for flights I always select San Antonio, Austin, Houston and Dallas as our departure options. For this trip I happened to find a great flight using miles on Air France flying out of Dallas. And since my parents are both disabled vets we get to park at DFW for free so a 4.5 hour drive was worth skipping an extra layover.

This also gave us the opportunity to go see a Texas Rangers game and have dinner with one of my best friends from high school who I haven’t seen in five-plus years.

With a Sunday afternoon flight, we also got to check out Hurtado BBQ which was ranked one of the Top 50 BBQ joints in Texas Monthly annual BBQ issue. Needless to say, it didn’t disappoint.

We are scheduled to take off at 3:45 p.m. and arrive in Paris at 8:05 a.m. We have a lengthy layover before arriving in Oslo at 3:30 p.m. We will then take the train from the airport to downtown Oslo where we stat at the Raddison Blu Plaza Hotel which is less than a 200-meter walk from the train station and located right on the water.

We will spend two days in Olso exploring the sites before taking the Bergensbanen train to Bergen where we will board the Viking Saturn for our 14-day British Isles cruise. Here’s where we are going.

For Denise and I this will be a chance to visit many places we have only dreamt about. For my parents, some of the ports will be new for them while some will take them back to various cities they visited when they were stationed in Germany.

So I want to invite you to virtually follow us on this journey. I will do my best to post here on a very regular basis but with only sea day on this trip, I might run a little late. So make sure you follow 3x5adventures on Instagram so you can keep up with the ports.