Norway Was My Bucket List Trip. It Was Also My First Time in Europe. Here Is What That Felt Like.

I have wanted to go to Europe my entire life.

Not a specific country at first, just Europe, the idea of it, the history, and the age, and the sense that somewhere over there the world looked and felt fundamentally different from anywhere I had grown up. I grew up in Brownsville, Texas, went to college in Austin, moved to Boston, and spent years wanting to go without quite making it happen. And then Norway became the answer, and suddenly the trip that had lived in my imagination for so long had a shape.

Why Norway? Because it had everything I wanted in one place. Fjords. The Arctic Circle. A history that stretched back centuries. The northern lights. The particular kind of nature that exists nowhere else on earth. I had never been to Europe, and I did not want to ease in gently. I wanted to start somewhere that would make an impression. Norway seemed like the kind of place that does not do anything halfway.

I went last month for our fifth anniversary, traveling with my husband, my mom, and my brother, who turned 25 while we were in Tromsø. My husband had been to Europe before. For the rest of us, it was new. For me, it was the thing I had been waiting for.

The trip technically started in Copenhagen. We had a layover and cleared customs there before continuing to Oslo, and the moment a customs agent stamped my passport and said, “Welcome, I hope you enjoy your trip,” something shifted. That was the moment I believed I was actually going. My brother's bag did not make the connection and had to come on the next flight, which gave us an unplanned hour to stand around at an international airport, slightly anxious together. The bag arrived. We kept going. Norway was waiting.

Oslo was the city that introduced me to what Europe actually felt like, rather than what I had imagined. My husband said it looked like any other European city. I did not have that frame of reference. I am glad I did not because what I experienced was a place where a thousand years of history exists completely naturally alongside modern life, where you can eat dinner in one of the oldest buildings in the city. It does not feel like a museum; it just feels like Tuesday. We took a fjord cruise, visited the Natural History Museum, where I practiced my Norwegian with more enthusiasm than skill, and stood in front of artifacts from the 1200s trying to understand what it means to be in the presence of something that old.

I also spoke more Spanish in Norway than I expected. From restaurant servers to welcome center staff in Tromsø, there were more Spanish speakers than I had anticipated, and it made the country feel immediately warmer and more familiar in a way I had not planned on. Everyone was kind. Everyone was patient with English. Norway was easier to arrive in than I had feared.

And then there was Tromsø.

If Oslo was the introduction, Tromsø was the reason. We flew north into the Arctic Circle and landed in a city surrounded by mountains and water and a particular quality of winter light that does not exist anywhere I have been before. We fed reindeer. We visited the Troll Museum. We went to the Arctic Cathedral, which I wanted to photograph, and which delivered completely. We went to Mack's Brewery, the northernmost brewery in the world, because of course we did. Let’s not forget the quick stop at the northernmost McDonald’s in the world, either.

And on the first night, I took the Fjellheisen cable car up Storsteinen Mountain. I watched the northern lights appear over the mountains and cried, which I have written about separately and which I will never fully be able to explain to someone who has not seen them. The second night, we went on a tour to Skarsfjord, and the lights came back stronger; I cried again and laughed this time, too, because it was just so much, all of it, all at once.

On the flight home, I felt incredible and sad at the same time. Filled with the way you feel after something you waited a long time for actually delivers. My husband, who had been to Europe before, understood it differently. For me, it was the closing of a loop that had been open my whole adult life. I had wanted this. I had gotten it. It was everything.

I need a new bucket list trip now. Something achievable. Something that does not have to be Norway because nothing will be Norway again in quite that way. The first time only happens once, and I am grateful beyond what I can write here that mine happened like this, with the people I love, in the Arctic Circle, under a sky doing things I had only ever seen in photographs and could not compare to what I had seen in New England just months prior.

Go to Norway. Go in winter if you can. Look up.

Always look up.

My favorite photo of the entire trip.