The last time I set foot in Tromsø, it was late December and it was dark. Flying in yesterday afternoon was a completely different experience, for a number of reasons. The flight was 2 hours from Bergen on a small Wideroe plane – “It’s a new plane!” said Harald, our taxi driver from the Bergen AirBnB to the small airport. “The old ones had propellers but now they don’t.”

(Harald also asked, of our gruelling Ulriken-Fløyen hike, “Ah, you did that! That takes about 3 hours, right?” Way to rub it in, Harald.)

We got through the airport with very little trouble, apart from Dan having his backpack pulled and searched.

“Do you have something like…a stone? In here?” asked the security agent, confused. Dan laughed because he did have a stone! He’d taken one in hopes of skipping it in Tromsø. Surprisingly, he was allowed to keep it.

For most of the flight, we soared above a quilt of clouds. Inevitably, we had to descend through them; outside the window was a world of white, and as we lost altitude, the whites became darker and gray, but still it was impossible to see where we were going.

“Landing by instruments only,” said Michael after he and Kelly emerged from the jet bridge. I was glad I’d been blissfully ignorant as the landing gear groaned out and suddenly we were out of the cloud and so close to a fjord our wheels could have been skimming it.

Stepping off the plane and onto the jet bridge, it was obvious how different Tromsø was from Bergen. For starters, it was very cold and also very rainy. We’d left a pleasant, fall Bergen behind with all of its sunshine and traded it in for this rainy city tucked away in the Arctic Circle.

Our first order of business was to get from the airport to the Eurospar, a grocery store near to our AirBnB. We got into a taxi outside the airport and rode 20 minutes to the grocery store, warm and dry and squeezed inside with all of our luggage.

Around this time, Michael hopped on a work call. (Michael is not a teacher; he works remotely for a college in Pennsylvania, though his CV is sprinkled with very cool jobs that involve the government and becoming pals with very cool presidents.)

We left Michael on the phone, guarding our luggage, in the entryway to the grocery store. The Eurospar was a welcoming contrast to Bergen’s Joker. Where the Joker had all the energy of a bustling Turkish bazaar, the Eurospar was its quiet cousin, with dozens of aisles to get lost in, all of them nearly empty of other people. We shopped (er, overshopped, maybe), gathering enough food to last us a week though we were only staying for 4 days.

Our trip completed, we gathered Michael and his things and shuffled outside to find the bus stop. We would take the 28 bus in the direction of Solisten and then walk about 12 minutes to the AirBnB.

One thing to note if you’re taking public transport in Norway is that their bus apps are incredibly user-friendly, but different in every city. In Bergen, we’d downloaded Skyss and purchased our tickets on the app. In Tromsø, we found ourselves standing on a rainy corner, trying to download Svipper as our bus drove up through the rain.

I asked the driver if we could instead purchase tickets, as our apps were still downloading and instead of quietly boarding the bus, the Swiss rule-follower in me insisted I was honest. The driver said we could, but when I took out my credit card, he waved his hand and said, “Cash only. Do you have the app?”

He waved us on, instructing us to download the app instead of hold up his bus route. One thing we had not done in all of our time in Norway so far was take out any cash. This hadn’t hindered us at all, apart from the Svipper bus and poor Harald, our Bergen taxi driver, who insisted we not add tip on the credit card as he would just be taxed on it.

Comfortably packed into the bus, we watched the scenery blur by outside as the bus wound along hillsides and onward toward our next temporary home. We got off with a splash, then crossed the road and began the trek uphill. Our AirBnB was the last in a row of modern, sleek-looking homes whose windows overlooked the fjord and the snow-capped mountains beyond. Kelly typed in the code and we pulled our rainy gear through the door and into the warmth of one of the most beautiful AirBnBs I’ve ever had the fortune of staying in.

The hallway in front of me was wood-floored, with one bedroom on my right and two more at the end of the hall, each with its own set of windows offering unobstructed views of the fjord, now twinkling in early evening blue. There was a laundry room and a bathroom whose toilet seat cover would whir open every time you walked past it.

We’d been told this was a “smart” home, so it took us some time to figure out all the mechanisms. The toilet was my favorite; when you sat on it, it made whirring sounds and the seat warmed, conjuring cozy memories of all those warm and hygienic toilets in Japan.

From the doorway, a set of smooth wooden stairs spiraled up and led to a living room with floor to almost-ceiling windows that opened onto a wooden deck overlooking – you guessed it! – the fjord. The kitchen also boasted two windows looking out back to the mountain behind us, which in the daylight was a hodge-podge of autumnal colors: mustard, olive green, butter yellow. If you looked up, the autumnal colors gently gave way to snow. It was as if some giant had turned a confectioner sugar sifter upside down and shook out the powder over the mountaintops.

It was a dream. Eames chairs reclined beside a pot of shamrocks against the sliding glass doors, a brown distressed couch with funky-patterned pillows invited you to curl up in the corner and gaze outside, and the dining table offered its own views out yet another window facing onto the mountain.

It was all perfect – until Michael revealed with a sad sigh that he had lost his phone. Somewhere between the grocery store and our own little Nordic paradise, Michael’s phone had disappeared. He figured it was on the 28 bus, but a few phone calls to the Svipper lost and found were unproductive. An answering service picked up immediately and barked out breathless instructions in rapid Norwegian. I tried pressing random numbers in hopes I would be connected to a human, but alas, this was not to be.

In the end, Michael sent an email to the address listed on the Svipper Lost and Found website, we cracked some cans of Mack beer (northernmost brewery, so they say!), and Dan and Kelly made a heaping dinner of roasted vegetables and falafel salad while I obsessively pored over the Northern Lights forecasts in several different apps.

It was an eventful welcome to Tromsø, and I went to bed with a full stomach and the delightful sensation that I was sleeping on a cloud.