Nowhere

Actually I have been infected by him a while ago. Several times, we went out geocaching together and it was great fun to look for the hidden boxes :). Yet, I hadn't quite made up my mind if I wanted to buy a GPS or not. Things changed when my quite old mobile phone gave up to work and I needed a new one so I decided to get one with GPS receiver. The GPS itself was actually quite accurate once it worked but it always needed some time until it started to work and the biggest disadvantage was the battery - it was only good for about half a day and of course a phone doesn't use normal batteries, you could easily take with you. So, finally I got a real GPS and am really happy with it.
Between Christmas and New Year, I picked up a travel bug which had Norway as one of it's preferred destinations so I took it with me and am now trying to set it out.
The first time I went skiing on the illuminated track since it was already dark and unfortunately couldn't find the cache although I must have been close to it.
The second time I tried to ski in the backcountry on a hiking trail and didn't come very far - snowshoes would have been better because the top of the snow cover was frozen and the ground rather uneven - oh well at least I didn't meet any people and that was the main goal :)



Looks like fluffy nice snow but it is more like cement ;)






That's the so called Swedish wall - normally out of rocks.



The sky looked very nice unfortunately I didn't really get a good spot completely without trees.



And a blurred moon ... looked much better of course

One really cool thing here are the lighted slopes so skiing is possible even after work when it is getting dark. There was just some new snow again when we did the night tour - and partly we even skied in the falling snow. This time we were more restricted because there are not that many slopes with light - so we chose Frognerseteren - Ullevålseter and back. It was fantastic! The pics are not so good due to the lack of a tripod but then they are just to get an impression ;)





Now it is definitely spring - so we are glad that we used the opportunity to ski over Easter.

On Sunday, we were only two and one of our dreams was always to go for a bigger skiing tour, so we decided to start at Frognerseteren again (it is just so convenient) and ski to Kikutstua and back which is something like 25 km. The distance itself was not really the problem but the steep uphill slopes were quite strenuous and the steep downhill slopes quite hard to manage with cross-country skis and some of those were despite the new snow quite icy (here the slopes are sometimes more like hiking trails and not like these totally prepared slopes in Germany and Switzerland - has advantages and disadvantages). Still we managed the tour and it was fantastic - the weather was great and there were not too many people because most Norwegians went on holidays somewhere else over the Easter weekend. Kikutstua is quite funny itself because you can get drinks and waffles and some other food in the middle of nowhere - as it seems. Of course there are gravel roads going there but 'normal' people cannot go there by car ;) In summer it can be quite nice because somewhere I saw that they rent out canoes (maybe the is not up-to-date anymore) since it is on the shore of Bjørnsjøen - a quite big lake there.
Some pics:



On the lake:

Already more than a week ago! Of course that one day of skiing wasn't enough for us, we went the next two days and had fantastic weather. Unfortunately I forgot to switch back some settings of the camera so the pictures are not really good but they will do to show how much snow we had and how nice it is with sun ;) Friday and Saturday we made something like 8 km loops - so quite easy going. On Friday we started at Frognerseteren and ended the round at Holmenkollen. On Saturday we started at Voksenkollen and ended the tour at Frognerseteren with a stop in the Cafeteria there.

Ha I really thought that they were just making a bad joke since there were so many times when they said there will be snow and what did we get - two snowflakes melting instantaneously in the air before even reaching the ground.
But not yesterday/today - they had predicted snow and I was not believing that until I actually saw it snowing and snowing and snowing - the whole night and it didn't stop.
So in the morning one could see two extremely happy people jumping through the appartment and being really enthusiastic to have another chance to ski (probably every day of the weekend) while the others just asked themselves probably for the thousandth time why they are in Oslo and not in Spain ;)
Well , we didn't care and we were happy that we were two of the same kind, picked up another one who really appreciated the snow (actually a Spanish girl) and went on skiing. And what do I have to say - fantastic! And tomorrow we will also go a round and there is supposed to be some sun. I think we freaked out quite a little bit doing snow angels and jumps into the snow ;)
Anyway - some pics:

Chrystelle posing nicely for the picture:



Snow!!!!

But 3 weeks ago there was snow as can be seen here:

Finally some snow pictures! For that we had to leave Oslo, of course. We took the train in the direction of Gjørvik to a place called Grua. While we were sitting there and talking, Chrystelle heard the announcement for the next stop and thought that the guy said Grua. So we went to the door but the stop didn't really look like a stop and in addition the sign where the name of the stop should have been was missing. So we didn't really know if we should get out or not and since we were so undecided the train started to move before we could get out. Then while the train was accelerating, we saw some kind of graffiti on another sign which said Grua. Well, we thought ... ok then we just go a stop further and try to ski back and find some other tracks. But it took quite a while until the train stopped the next time so we got out there and we were ...guess... in Grua. After this good laugh, we found the tracks quite easily and started skiing.
Here we are quite enthusiastic:



These are my two ski-mates Delphine and Chrystelle (Chrystelle is also my flat-mate).



A lot of snow! And almost nobody on the tracks - at least for the first 5.5 km. The profile was quite hilly with very steep slopes up- and downhill so it was not the easiest but we still had a lot of fun!



Towards the end, we even had some sun.