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(click the pictures for enlargements).
End of 2008 After nearly 8 years in England, it's starting to look as though we're heading back to Norway. Tracy has a job offer as Senior Priest at a big evangelical church in Sandnes and there are many reasons why it looks as though it might be where we're supposed to be. The only problem is that we don't know this part of Norway at all. Our only experience of it is when we used to live in Norway there were two people in the village that we could never understand. One was Danish (and spoke only Danish, with a broad dialect as well) and the other was a lady who seemed to speak complete gibberish. We thought she was from Iceland or somewhere. It transpires she was from near Sandnes. Looks like we're going to have to get used to a whole new dialect!
We spent a lot of time looking at houses. On 29 December 2008, Tim sent an email to Tracy describing an "incredible palace (complete with dozens of acres and modern stabling) half an hour plus a long wiggly road into the hills away from Sandnes ...". We wrote off that suggestion because it was too far away.
Tim is offered a job near the house, and it's back in the picture.
In addition, when we look more closely, it has some astonishing features.
We'd never really intended to leave our previous house in Norway and had put into it all kinds of unique features and fittings that just appealed - things we'd never seen anywhere else.
When we moved to the UK for Tracy's ministry's training, one of the hardest things to give up (apart from our friends and familiar places) was this house into which we had put so much of ourselves.
The house in this remote valley had every one of these "unique features and fittings" and more - as though everything we had given up was being returned to us, with interest.
Spring 2009. We've bought a mountain. Tracy and I both read the Thomas Firbank book "I bought a mountain" years ago, and dreamed the same dream. Now it's come true and we've bought a small farm together with most of a forest-covered mountain, in a very remote Norwegian valley. (See photo of the house and our forest-covered mountain, right - click for enlargement). There are plenty of other photos elsewhere of the house and immediate area.
Here's what happens to the dream.
Moving has grown more complicated since last time.
We've grown a bit older and it's not as easy to uproot any more, we have dogs in tow and all the regulations have become more complicated.
In fact, oddly enough, the most difficult thing was to get the dogs to Norway.
In order to use the "simplified" regulations with pet passorts rather than rabies injections and quarantine, the dogs had to come directly to Norway without passing through any third country on the way.
As there is no longer a direct boat other than cargo boats that won't take animals, this meant flying them.
Unfortunately, Fudge is an inch too big for BA regulations - being the only airline that takes dogs to Norway.
Fortunately, inspiration struck and we rang a flying school at Sola airport in Stavanger and asked whether anyone needed a long-distance flight for any kind of licence, and offered to pay the petrol if they'd pop over to Newcastle and collect a couple of dogs.
Amazingly, this suggestion appealed to someone and the dogs were duly collected in a light plane and given a private ride to Norway.
Don't know what they thought of this because they were lightly drugged at the time.
Picture, left - click for enlargement.
By comparison, moving ourselves was fairly straightforward.
We warned the removal company that there was a low tunnel leading into the valley and suggested that they contacted the Norwegian highways agency to check on the height of it.
The removal men turned up in Haworth with a vast lorry (4.2 metres heigh).
"Did you ring and check the height of the tunnel?", we asked. "No", they said, "we go to Norway all the time. We know all about tunnels".
We rang the highways agency there and then. The clearance in the tunnel was 3.9 metres.
Panic all round.
Because someone had to be in England to despatch the dogs at the same time as someonw was in Norway to receive them, Tracy and Katie went first, whilst Tim and Andrew stayed in England for a couple of days extra. Safely in �rsdalen, Tracy asked someone about the tunnel height. "It's all right", came the answer. "You'll get your lorry through. Recently a farmer wanted to get some hen-house buildings through the tunnel and they wouldn't fit. You can't make the roof any higher, but we took a JCB and dug out the road. There's now 4.3 metres clearance. But the highways people don't know".
So the removal lorry got through after all. They took an hour to do it, though, because they took it an inch at a time with one person walking in front, just to be sure that they wouldn't end up stuck there for ever.
"What in the name of everything that moves are you doing moving here?" asked the removal man when he'd finally managed to get his lorry along miles of twisting lanes, through a mile of tunnel that was an inch higher than his lorry and down the winding hill into our valley.
But by the following day, as he was leaving, something had changed.
"You know, I understand now why you're living here", he said.
We arrived just before the longest day, so one of our first meetings with everyone else in the village was at the "St Hans" party.
Everyone gathered on the beach by the lake, lit a bonfire and had a BBQ supper.
Swimming in the lake until well after midnight
(Click the photo, right, for a series of pictures - were all taken around midnight).
We had week after week of unbroken sunshine and hot weather - well up in the 30s: as hot as Spain.
Most days we went down to the river and swam (there are beautiful sandy beaches and clear pools in the river) or used the kayak.
The dogs loved it too - they were desperate to cool off in the water.
(Click the picture to view several more of river and kayak).
A vital summer task was chopping wood ready for the winter (click photo, right, for a series of cutting pictures).
Other important activities for the summer included
exploring the garden (photo of Matt and Katie on a rock in the garden, left)
and trying out everything the valley has to offer (which Katie is enthusiastically doing, right).
(Click any of these pictures for enlargements)
Going for a walk involves dealing with any amount of local wildlife playing the goat.
The end of the school holidays meant catching the school bus, which leaves from the bottom of our drive every morning at 10 to 7 or so.