Norway Adventures

We then got ready and headed out.  I was convinced that the jacket I had was not going to be sufficient, so Kettle let me borrow one of his (pictured above).  We headed out to the World Famous Ski Jump.  They have hosted a couple of Olympic events here and have world ski jump challenges annually.

The picture above is Marta and Aimee and our tour guide Grogg.  Trolls are very common here in Norway.  It is the figurehead of a lot of children’s stories.  They used to sacrifice animals to the Trolls in exchange for a prosperous year.  They stopped doing that in the late 90’s.  The other picture is me riding on the Kings poodle.  The statue is of the last King who was very popular with the Norwegians.  I don’t know how popular I was for riding his poodle, but it was fun, and uh cold.

The first ski jump was built here in the late 1800’s and has been reconstructed four times over the past 120 years.  We walked through the museum which had some history about Norwegians and their skiing history.  Norwegians are the first people to reach the South Pole.  They are the first people to cross Greenland.  The first woman to walk alone to the South Pole.  And the inventor of the paper clip.  No joke.

We were able to take an elevator and several flights of stairs to the top of the ski jump.  What a view!  Freakin’ Cold but a great view.

After we went through the museum, saw what there was to see from the ski jump, we started our walk back to the car.  We were maybe a 1/2 mile from our car.  Can I tell you how fast Norwegians walk?  I am not kidding you.  They have to be one of the fastest walking peoples of all time.  Anyhow, some of the strange sights on the way to the car was first, snow making machines.  They had 2 snow making machines cranking out massive amounts of snow.  I wondered if these two snow makers were responsible for covering the whole country.  If I unplugged them would I end this vicious winter?  And the other thing I saw was cross country skiers.  This looks like one of the cooler sports around.  You may say to yourself, "that doesn’t sound like the James I know" however, these cross country skiers were like none I had ever seen.  These guys wore a full, skin tight, spandex outfit.  And carried a gun.  I wondered if the gun was added after the uniforms were picked out.  Anyhow, these guys ski, stop and shoot.  Ski stop and shoot.  Pretty cool.

We then drove up the hill a little more and came up to a house that was built in 1891.  It was built out of logs and had some great dragon carvings.  We stopped and had some apple crisp that was probably the best I have ever had, and a cup of coffee.  Very relaxing time.

It was getting dark, 3:15pm you know, and so we decided to head back to the house.  They were having company over tonight so they need to get a few things ready.

Did I mention that it is almost always dark here?  I kid you not.  Sunrise today was 9:16am and it sat at 3:16pm.  Nuts, huh?

Anyhow, company arrived at 7:00pm.  Camila had set up the living rooms coffee table with eight place settings of a coffee mug, plate, fork, and spoon, lots of little candies, coffee, soda, tea, different cakes and breads, my kind of party.  We sat down and relaxed with them until about 11:30pm.  It was a very nice time of talking and enjoying each others stories.

We had a great day sight seeing and a wonderful time with friends.