How I showed my mum some Norway, part 2

This is part 2 of a trip report. Part 1 can be found here.

I left part 1 off at a point where we, two unprepared tourists, had just climbed up and down a considerable mountain and still had the 2nd half of the day ahead of us. We were somewhat exhausted, but also glad we had chosen to go ahead and do it, and quite proud of ourselves. Afterall, we both grew up used to landscapes flatter than an ironing board; even if I have now lived in hillier countries for a few years and taken good advantage of it, I still hadn't done anything quite up to that scale. But now I definitely dare to say that I hope that this is just the start and that I'd certainly like to be scaling more impressive peaks soon.

Now, before I get to what happened next, here's some more music to enjoy, as promised.

How I showed my mum some Norway, part 1

As anyone who has been watching my social media would notice, I recently did some travelling. Of course, I'm generally on the move a lot, but the trip I'm referring to now was an outlier in many ways. For example, I've rarely ever felt so mad excited (and afterwards, satisfied) about a trip that didn't even involve crossing a single international border - at least, not for me. While I've never minded domestic travelling, it has never been quite as special as going to another country; but of course, now that I live in Norway, a world-class tourist destination, I dare to say that rule can be rewritten. However, my mother, who was my travel companion this time around had to cross a couple of borders to get here; in fact, this trip was a surprise-present from me to her.

Throughout the whole planning and waiting stage that lasted for about two months, it felt like the most ridiculous idea ever. It was also somewhat tricky to find the perfect balance between all the ideas I had and constrictions of time, budget and eventually, energy. Thankfully, I managed to concoct a plan I was and still am extremely satisfied with, which ended up (not quite intentionally) having many similarities to a part of my first ever trip to Norway that Sverre organised for me. One of the similarities being that the two trips were just a day or two (depending on what part you look at) away from being exactly three years apart. Anyway, the blog post about the similar part of my first trip can be found here, should you fancy running a comparison. In any case, even if I had been through most of this before, it still proved to be quite a lot of new and exciting experiences for me, let alone for my mother to whom all of this was new.

26th of April, 2016. The weather was actually lovelier that day, but it had generally been colder that spring, which meant more snow in the mountains and mostly frozen waterfalls.

25th of April, 2019. The weather was mostly overcast, and I couldn't really retake the photo quite as far out on the pier as I had in 2016, because there was a small ship parked there all day and she would've covered up most of the background. 

Now, those who have been reading my old blog(s) for years, know that I'd sometimes give some music to accompany my posts. Heck, this is probably going to be a bit of a read, so you may as well buckle up, and if you wish for something to enhance the mood, enjoy this.

April fools!

While I didn't write anything on this blog yesterday, I couldn't resist the temptation to deliver a proper rickroll, a meme as old as time itself, on the Facebook page. Of course, while I do have respect for the people who manage to continuously pump out interesting content on Youtube, doing that myself is not in my list of plans for the predictable future.

Sorry, not happening. But if you do have the compulsive need to like and subscribe to stuff, feel free to do so for this blog on the sidebar to the right, as well as on the Facebook page. Like. Follow. Share. Turn on notifications. Go wild.

I do have a decent amount of appreciation for April Fools' day, and I wouldn't mind having a couple more such days per year. As someone put it quite well, the first of April is the only day of the year where people take everything they read with a grain of salt and tend to double check before accepting it as truth - a practice that should be common any day of the year. Either way I certainly enjoy hearing about all the glorious jokes people, various institutions and companies pull off. In this post, I'll include some more memorable ones I've come across, as well as some I've pulled off myself, over the years.

Cruise ships? In Fredrikstad?!?

... Apparently!

This is how I roll, animal print pants outta control

Spring 2004. I'm 7 years old, the weather is getting nicer and nicer and I'm seeing all the older kids on rollerskates. I had finally gotten the hang of actually moving forward on ice skates some months earlier, saw all the older kids having fun on their skates and thought that damn, it's time I get on wheels. So, my dad dug out an ancient pair of quad skates for me and off I went.
Granted, by that point inline skates were the mainstream and quad skates horribly outdated, but I was having enough fun to not care so much; I'd sometimes skate to school, and over the summer I started feeling fairly confident.

One grumpy kid sitting on the roof of her dad's ancient van.

The Tale of the Three Cities aka how I found out that homesickness is actually a thing

Ever grow up in a country and yet feel that it's just... not your country?

My 2018

Somehow, I feel like 2018 has been less eventful than the years before; on the other hand, if I think about it a little more, that's not fully true. It has been somewhat fluctuating, in some months I did a ton of things and in others less, and what did I do in November? Beats me. So, this year's summary will be free-form. Maybe I will return to the summary by months as I've always done it before, that remains to be seen.