So what's been happening this month? Feels like a lot actually! Some great, some not quite as great.. but I suppose such is life. The end of the Norwegian summer holiday seems to always unleash a great bursting wave of activity and general restlessness that crashes against the peace and calm of the preceding months. Causing chaos. Well, not chaos, but that's what it often feels like to me anyway.
Which is why, I usually take my summer holiday just about when everyone is coming back :). As mentioned earlier, this year we went for another nice long cycling holiday. Along large parts of Peer Gynt vegen this time! The weather, while proving extremely unpredictable, was nonetheless very kind to us! Only actually raining on us a couple of the days and even then not particularly hard :).
Distance-wise this trip was about half what we did last year, but was in no way less spectacular! And each day turned out to be of a somewhat different nature. The first day a lot of time was spent climbing up into the hills as we left the Gudbrandsdal valley behind us, and as such the landscape twisted and turned to reveal new vistas every so often, with farms and lakes sprawling in the sometimes wide, sometimes narrow valleys. A rather long and slow day of cycling, but it got us to the highly recommended Ruten Fjellstue hotel. It turned out, actually, to be the first of a couple of very nice places we stayed at during the trip!
The second day was a story of basically two valleys. Cycling mostly downhill along the first one, enjoying the mesmerising views of Espedalsvatnet at the bottom of it. And then up the next one along more narrow meandering streams that occasionally broadened out into decent sized lakes :). Eventually, we reached Peer Gynt country. So for those not in the know, Peer Gynt is an iconic play by Henrik Ibsen that gets performed every summer by the stunning lake Gålåvatnet, and we were spending the next couple of nights at Gålå overlooking said lake!
Luckily, this was soon after the Peer Gynt festivities, and the place was pretty quiet. We got to enjoy the beautiful views and some walks in the vicinity as we took a break from cycling. But the next day, we were off again, this time cycling one of the more frequented stretches of Peer Gynt vegen through landscape that was more high plateau than valley. The views were correspondingly wider, more open, but no less enchanting :).
It didn't take us too long to make our way down to Skei, even though we tried to take as long as we could, making small detours and stopping often :). Skei is very much the popular-ish skiing town not too far from Oslo and in my opinion this makes it a bit less pretty. Still, we enjoyed our stay as well the best breakfast of the whole trip!
The final day was spent climbing over into the valley next door for the first part, skirting lakes, dodging thunderclouds, enjoying the last of the properly wild views and paths till we finally hit proper tarmac and a reasonably sized river. Which we proceeded to follow all the way to Lillehammer and our train back! Via a very nice dinner at a café in a very pretty park in the middle of town :).
Back home, this time I'd decided to take a few extra days off to not feel like it was straight back to the daily grind after lots of cycling :). So there was enough time for some relaxing and enjoying the fact of being on holiday while more or less everyone else all around was not :D. There was also time for a visit to Oslo for a very enjoyable day consisting of a chamber orchestra concert, a long walk along various waterfronts, watching some exhibition diving off the Oslo Opera House (!!) and a very nice dinner!
Feels a bit crazy that all this was only a few weeks ago as the Covid numbers since then have not been pretty. But then, vaccination numbers here have been correspondingly very good. Which leads me to this weekend. Got my second dose Friday evening, and that was that for the next day or so :|. But having come out of it the other side, things are looking better :). A bit of a waste of absolutely stunning weather during the weekend though :P.
On the books side, I guess rather as expected, I haven't quite been devouring them one after the other as I had been earlier in the summer :). It was quite a fun experience finally reading Three Men in a Boat in it's entirety! I did really enjoy Jerome's way of describing the world around him, especially the historical anecdotes, which take on a more layered meaning read a century and a half later :).
The book club book this time was pretty awesome as well! Ignorant as I am of Eastern European authors in general, I was entirely unaware of Bohumil Hrabal. But reading his I Served the King if England was an absolute treat! I felt like I managed to not rush it, to savour the telling, and yet ended up reading it quite quickly. The layers to the story just kept getting added to as one went along till at the end everything was transformed... rather like the snow covered landscape on the last pages. Definitely looking forward to the discussion :).
After a somewhat wet and extremely blustery few days or weeks, I can't quite remember which, it's been lovely weather these last few days! Sunny, temperature in the twenties. Will this prove to be this summer's last hurrah? Who knows. There is much to hope for in the weeks that come, but will everything we hope for come to pass? Again, who knows :).
