Showing posts with label cabin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cabin. Show all posts

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Hiking in the mountains

We have been enjoying some gorgeous spring weather - none better than last weekend which fortunately happened to be a long weekend too. Joel and I had the brainwave to go for a hike and stay in a cabin. It turned out the 16km hike over tricky (but beautiful) terrain stretched my hiking capabilities to the limit and then some. We hiked from Vindalen to Flørlistålen. It was a lovely weekend but I think about half to two thirds that distance would have been perfect! We'll know for next time!

Also Joel spent some birthday money on a new camera lens, a Sigma 10-20 ultra wide angle F4-5.6 (for those of you who are into cameras...). He's pretty excited about it and has been bothering everyone with it! Even as I write this he's waving it in my face! Not annoying at all! Enjoy the pics!



Saturday, April 04, 2009

Spring in Stavanger

We have been enjoying a really lovely spring here in Stavanger. It’s amazing how quickly the days become longer and you emerge from the long dark winter and all of a sudden it’s springtime. The change of the seasons is so much more pronounced than in Australia, here there is genuine excitement when in February you start to see the little snow flowers grow, and tiny green buds start to form on branches and bushes.

We are lucky to have a beautiful forest area right on our doorstep, called Våland Skog. We take Coobs there for walks all the time. Joel has just bought a new lens for his digital camera, a 50mm prime F1.8 (whatever that means) and a tripod, so we tried it out in the forest the other day (and many days since).

What have we been up to? Well Joel had a trip up to the north of Norway to a place called Verdal, north of Trondheim for work. He was visiting a jacket up there, it’s 100m tall and it will be installed this year by a ship that can lift 14,000 tonnes. He seemed to think that was pretty impressive!

He has also been on a ‘teambuilding’ (read: junket) with work up to a beautiful place called Haukeli, and they also went downhill skiing in nearby Røldal. It’s about a 5 hour drive from Stavanger. He said that Haukeli is the kind of place you imagine when you think of winter in Norway. There is snow about 3m high, everything is absolutely white and they were spoilt with fantastic weather, blue sky and sunshine. I hope to get up there myself some time soon.

We were invited up to Joel’s work’s cabin for a weekend in Sirdal with Rob and his lovely girlfriend Inka. We had a great time up there cross country skiing.

We’re spoilt here in Norway with 5 days off over Easter (Thursday is a holiday) so we are going to head up to Sauda (about 100km north of Stavanger) for some skiing over the easter break. We’ve rented an apartment and will be joined by friends of ours Louise and Charles. He is Aussie, she is American and they lived together in London for the past 8 years or so before moving here. We’ll also be able to catch up with Mari, Kev and Oscar who will be staying with Mari’s family who live there.