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3 July -
The long-awaited pony arrival took place this afternoon (click photo, left, for pictures) and there is now full activity outside,
both securing fences and riding (pictures here).
Another arrival is Tim's car, returned from the garage after two months. We call it Tim's car, but it's a bit like the broom that's had both a new handle and a new brush end. With new gearbox, clutch, water pump and cam belt there's not such a lot left ... apart from the bill!
4 July - Pony arrives, Matt departs (it needed his bedroom) (click photo, right, to see him off). At 5am, Tim drove Matt to the railway station to start his 30-hour train journey from Egersund to Bodø. Matt's goods are packed and will be collected this afternoon, thanks to a Norwegian service in which vans and lorries that already are making a particular journey take additional items for a small cost. So Matt's removal (a small van's worth) is making the 1000-mile road journey from ørsdalen to Bodø for only £500. He will settle into his new flat tomorrow and start his new job in a couple of days - exciting times!
We'll have a proper home address for him shortly; in the meantime, his office address is:
Normisjon Nordland regionskontor
Postboks 672,
8001 Bodø
Norway.
(He has now arrived and is getting himself sorted).
7 July - Electricitry comes to ørsdalen!
There's a digger at the bottom of the drive (photo, left - click for enlargement, laying power cables which are supposed to give us a more stable electricity supply (better capacity and less prone to blowing down in the wind).
And a few weeks ago, the farm furthest up the valley (at Bjordal) got mains electricity for the very first time.
On Friday, they dug a trench across the bottom of the drive (we were warned in advance to park on the field at the bottom) and they've managed very creatively to dig around the post that holds up the post box.
Further down the valley, the cable is not underground, and new poles have been put up - tall, metal ones that seem to belong more to the M6 than to ørsdalen.
The annual operation to add lime to the lakes is in full flow (we suggested a dash of lemon as well) - this creates a better marine environment for the fish.
8 July - One man went to mow. With temperatures around 25°, Thomas Andrew has been cutting grass in our hayfield to provide winter food for horse and guinea pig (click photo, right, for enlargements). Speaking of cut grass, I forgot to report earlier in the year that one of our neighbours received a message from the dairy that the milk he had supplied had been alcoholic - it seems that his silage had been fermenting, making both cows and milk over the legal limit.
Matt's new address is:
Rauds gate 11,
8007 Bodø
Norway.
(here it is on Google Street View).
9 July - It's that time again, when we wash down and re-paint the house and barn. Fortunately it doesn't need doing every year. Three years ago we painted the house; this year we're intending to touch it in and re-paint the barn (which we left last time).
Just to mention it, we do keep the general information pages linked from the main page more-or-less up to date -
including useful information such as details of current flight routes,
as well as things like general photos of ørsdalen and so on.
12 July - With afternoon temperatures of 28° (in the 80s F), what could be better than to go down to the beach at the river here for a swim and just to sit on the sand, watching the fish jump and listening to the waterfalls all around? And, of course, eat a picnic tea - fresh prawns with white bread and mayonaise, then brioche and strawberries, with bottled cider. Then another splash in the river. As Tracy said this evening when she saw the photo (left - click for enlargement): we take it for granted because we see it every day, but doesn't it look a fantastic place?
About 80 miles east of here, at Froland, the local fire crew was unable to receive a message that their fire station was on fire because the warning system was on the fire station roof and was the first thing to go. The crew had just been out testing a new fire engine, and arrived at the fire station to find it completely destroyed. According to the fire chief, there were two fire engines inside, in addition to safety equipment, pumps, hoses and other equipment. "It's all gone. There's nothing left", he said. "Is that what they call irony?", said Thomas Andrew this evening.
13 July - The former transport museum in Fjærland (just up the coast from Bergen) is newly extended and re-opened as a transport and communication museum. But despite being 25% larger, there's still not much danger of getting lost amongst the exhibits. The existing building was a former toll booth, about the size of a large garden shed, and the new extension consists of a telephone box. They're now asking whether anyone has old telephone books to exhibit (everyone uses the internet these days!). photo of the museum here.
The pony is settling in very well and has turned out to be amenable and to have very few faults. He comes when you want him and doesn't get alarmed by tractors or even by flapping bits of plastic from feed bags. His only real failing is that he likes to escape from his field. It's not that he wants to get away (he usually just stands on the lawn and peeps in through the window) - it's just that in his view, fences are there as a challenge to be overcome. We wondered how he was managing to get out of his field, which was securely electric-fenced, so after returning him to the field yet again yesterday evening, Katie was posted on lookout duty. She sat for an hour, mug of hot chocolate in hand, on the top of the rock by the stables, until she saw how he was getting out. We then re-built the fences with extra reinforcement. Unfortunately, by that time the mosquitos were out in droves, which makes any kind of outside work difficult. Further east in Norway, the mosquitos are eighteen inches across and have to be fended off with cricket bats (disposal of them brings a whole new meaning to the term "fly tipping"). See photos here. Here, things are not so bad, but even so, Tim consists mostly of bites this morning. Following further breakouts, we've moved the fencing today to a flatter field, where the pony seems to have accepted defeat.
17 July -
We realised this morning that we don't have enough dog food for tomorrow.
We try never to run out of anything because visiting the nearest shop involves an hour-and-a-bit of driving,
which is not always convenient, but sometimes things just catch you unawares.
Usually a neighbour can supply the solution (or the item), but in this case I rang the farm supplies shop in Vikeså.
Nothing is ever much of a problem there.
They've put a sack of dog food on their doorstep, so that I can collect it later this evening, or Thomas Andrew can collect it if he happens to be going that way.
And if they spot anyone from ørsdalen during the day, they'll give the sack to them and we'll get it like that.
It'll be sorted.
3.45pm - a car has just pulled up outside the house and Cecilia - our closest neighbour a mile or so westwards - jumped out and pulled a sack of dog food from her boot.
"I was in Vikeså and the people at the farm shop asked me to bring you this sack".
The dogs were ecstatic - and we were pleased, too.
"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" (Ibsen's 'Peer Gynt') - Someone else who doesn't want to run out of things is the town of Lillehammer (close to where Peer Gynt lived in Ibsen's play). That's where the Winter Olympics were held in 1994. The town is now to host the World Cup in skiing, and they're determined not to run out of snow next winter. For this reason, they have stored over half million cubic feet of snow from last winter, hidden under a two-foot-thick layer of sawdust. "This stuff is worth its weight in gold", says Stein B. Olsen, manager of World Cup Lillehammer. He digs a bit out and tastes it. "It tastes of snow, too", he adds. "This is what summer is in Lillehammer", he says - "it's just the period between the winters". It's currently 21° (70° F) in Lillehammer and they're saying that hopefully it won't get too much warmer.
We missed the annual midsummer bonfire and party in ørsdalen because we were on holiday, but Thomas Andrew has provided a dramatic photo of the "environmentally-friendly bonfire" as well as a picture of the current state of the former road into ørsdalen (this stretch of road was replaced just a few years ago by a short tunnel). The safety barrier looks as though it could do with straightening a little.
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20 July - Daily Police report - The county police issues a daily report of all incidents in the county. Today's report contains two items:
21 July -Hot day - it touched over 37 °C today (100°F) in ørsdalen. Good job it's not Lillehammer, or all the snow would be gone (see story above).
BBC have just sent a message that the Radio 4 Bach programme broadcast (see 14 June) has been re-scheduled for the morning of 24 September rather than 6 August as previously planned.
22 July - 6 August - Travels in Germany. Once again, Thomas Andrew is minding home and animals whilst we are on the road - this time driving to Germany for a combined holiday and concert tour.
Like last year's trip to Germany, we decided to take an early-morning ferry from Kristiansand in Norway to Hirtshals in Denmark. Like last year, rather than leaving home at 2am we stayed the night with our good friends near Kristiansand — friends we have known for 27 years, since our days in the north of Norway. Like last year, we got lost while looking for their house and had to ring for directions. Having reached the north of Denmark we disrespectfully drove straight across the country without stopping (four hours), followed by a couple of hours into Germany, where — like last year — we stopped for the night at the Acht Linden hotel in Egestorf (location number 1 on the map). It was a conscious decision to stay at the same hotel as last year, partly because it was so very good and partly because we knew where it was.
We had originally hoped that it may be possible to get down to see our friends in central eastern Germany before the first concert,
but thanks to the distance, the heat and the rather cronky car
(which was making a repertoire of strange noises as well as vibrating uncomfortably)
we regretfully decided that this was not possible.
The first concert was at Dornheim, an attractive village near Arnstadt
(click photo, right, for pictures).
(location 2 on the map).
Like most places round there, the church had a connection with JS Bach (in this case, it was the church at which he was married)
and these days attracts 300000 visitors a year.
The concert was part of the well-known annual "Thuringen Organ Summer" festival.
The local organisers printed 50 programmes or so, which meant that they were overwhelmed by the 350 who turned up.
The church was full to capacity and the people were very enthusiastic, which was a good start to the tour.
Before the concert there was a reception with wine and food,
at which Katie was most gratified to see a champagne cork fly right up to the church roof before rolling back down and
landing down the neck of the unsuspecting lady organiser, causing her in turn to leap into the air.
This event naturally provided far better entertainment than the concert itself.
The spare time before travelling to the next concert was taken up with visits to wonderful places like Erfurt and Eisenach,
including a look round the slightly-disappointing Luther museum (click photo, right, for enlargement)
— they don't seem to think as highly of Luther as of Bach in Eisenach -
a 6-hour visit to a wonderful spa pool and gardens with a variety of pools and saunas,
an enjoyable visit to a "Go-Ape"-type climbing centre (click photo, left, for enlargement).
and some fabulous German meals in local hotels.
We stayed at a hotel that was described as "the best hotel in town in the olden days".
It evidently had been wonderful in 1950s DDR (East Germany) and it was easy to see what life had been like then,
largely because the hotel hadn't changed except to get a bit dustier and more in need of a coat of paint.
This next year, Katie is to be learning German at school, so she was very interested to see how much she could understand — and she was surprised and thrilled to find that she understood very much and could even hold simple conversations, especially when it came to ordering ice creams.
Our trusty German hotels website didn't really offer anything very attractive in Dortmund, which was the site of the next concert, on Sunday evening, so we decided to stay in a village half an hour's drive north of the city, which would also give us a head start for Monday's long journey to the north coast. In the event, the hotel was wonderful (and provided a fabulous dinner). Here we had left half-timbered mid-Germany far behind and were in a Denmark-like landcsape of small, red-brick villages. (Location 3 on the map). The concert was in the historic, 12th-century city-centre church, and formed part of the Ruhr Festival. The programme contained disconcerting hype - an introduction by the President of the German Parliament promising that this would be one of a dozen brilliant concerts by international artists - but again, the concert was well and enthusiastically attended. The organ was in a gallery high up towards the back of the church — well out of sight of the people down below — so the organisers tried a new experiment: a video camera to film the console, projected onto the church wall. This worked very well (except Tracy complained afterwards that she could see Tim wiping sweaty hands on his suit trousers between pieces — it was extremely hot!) until the system timed out (it presumably had a time limit of an hour) and started showing adverts. (Dortmund is location 4 on the map).
At both Arnstadt and Dortmund, people had asked where the next concerts were.
When we replied that the next one was in Barth, people just looked at us blankly.
Barth? Where's that? We wondered why. It's a seaside town between Rostock and Stralsund, not very far from the Polish border
(location 5 on the map).
We understood more when we got there. It's somehow a very forgettable town.
There are some lovely buildings and quaint streets (click photo, right, for enlargement), but not many, and somehow the place seems to lack character.
The hotel we stayed in for 2 nights lacked no character, however.
It was a castle, complete with moat, turrets and large estate (click photo, below right, for pictures).
Originally a real 14th-century castle, the family wanted a bit more comfort in the 19th-century
and replaced it in 1846 with an updated manor house that still looked like the real thing.
It was absolutely wonderful and we'd love to visit it again,
although it was evident that the place demanded more upkeep than it was possible to give it.
The concert was in the vast 13th-century (brick-built!) church at Barth, with its very large and querky 175-year-old organ which was quite demanding to play. But all went well and again there was a large and enthusiastic audience.
After Barth we had several days of freedom before the fourth concert,
so we visited Berlin (where we strolled under the Brandenburg Gate (picture here)
and saw the parliament building, cathedral and so on) (location 6 on the map).
It's less well known that there's another Brandeburg Gate, built 18 years earlier by Frederick the Great (or rather, by his staff),
just a few miles away at Potsdam (location 7 on the map).
Potsdam is really a much nicer town than Berlin, which is why the royal family chose to live there and
Frederick the Great built his great place and gardens (Sanssouci, or "no worries"), often known as "the German Versailles".
So we spent a day wandering around the fantastic palaces and gardens there (now Germany's largest World heritage site)
(click photo, left, for pictures),
before ending the day at another spa pool and sauna gardens nearby.
An interesting feature of Germany is that public car parks allocate spaces for women drivers.
You don't have to reverse into these spaces, and the concrete pillars have got embroidered padded cushions on them.
(Actually, that last bit wasn't strictly true, but if you don't believe me about the parking spaces, see
picture here).
From there we went on to Weimar, where Tim will be playing a concert in mid-August (location 8 on the map).
Weimar, which is also a World Heritage site, is one of those absurdly photogenic cities, where every time you amble along one of the lovely cobbled streets it opens out into one of those squares that seems to have been designed as a film set for the Pied Piper
(click photo, right, for pictures).
And when you're tired of doing that, you can lie down (as we did) on the grassy banks of the river and watch people splashing in the water to cool off.
To add to perfection, we stayed at a most lovely hotel just outside Apolda.
Weimar is one of those places, like Leipzig, where so many famous people have lived that they don't quite know who to celebrate.
JS Bach lived and worked there for a while before falling out with his employer and landing in jail for a month;
his best-known composer son CPE Bach was born there.
But Liszt and Strauss also worked there, along with so many authors and philosophers
that local residents Goethe and Schiller have to share a statue, standing arm in arm in front of the theatre.
The final concert was at Gräfenhain, near Gotha (picture here) (location 9 on the map). The village itself wasn't so very striking, but the people were lovely. The organist met us, showed us round this most lovely church, with its art work and its Thielmann organ from 1728 and told us that when we were hungry we were to present ourselves at a restaurant up the hill out of the village. We strolled up the hill in mid afternoon to find the little outdoor restaurant with open views over the Thüringen Wold, just at the edge of a pine forest. They had evidently been instructed to feed us with local speciality food, because they rapidly produced hearty meals of meat in gravy, potato dumplings, pickled red cabbage and sourkraut, served with chilled German beer. As we were slowly walking back into the village, a car pulled up and its cheerful driver leaned out of the window and told us that back at the church he had just delivered a basket with coffee and cakes for us. Also at the church was a local journalist who spoke a little Norwegian (he'd worked in Trondheim for a while) and other villagers, all of whom were very cheery. With an audience of only 50-60, this was the least well attended concert, but the villagers were tremendously enthusiastic, insisted that we should come back the year after next to do another concert, pressed us to take wine home with us and waved us off even down to the second set of traffic lights beyond the village.
We decided to return to Norway not through Denmark but on the large overnight ferry from Kiel (location 10 on the map) to Oslo. This gives us an 8-hour drive in Norway but cuts out the last hour of Germany and four hours of Denmark, and means that we can sleep on board the ferry overnight. To avoid the stress of rushing to catch the mid-day ferry from Kiel (which is a good 5 hour's drive from Gräfenhain) we opted to drive in the evening immediately after the concert as far as Egestorf and stay in the same hotel that we'd stayed in the first night (location 1 on the map). Reaching there at 10.15 that evening we were able to make a leisurely start, do some shopping and get the car tracking fixed and the wheels re-balanced in Kiel (in a vain attempt to stop the rattling) before getting the boat back to Norway.
Now safely home after more than 3000 very rattly miles! And Tim is busy packing for his trip to Weimar this weekend (this time by air to Berlin and train to Weimar).
PS - the extra bit ...
I found Bach this morning, just around a corner, peering steadfastly down a side street. As I wrote earlier, Weimar has so many famous citizens to celebrate that it's hard to do them all justice, so Bach has to make do with a modest and slightly out-of-the-way statue. But there again, if I had to choose one place in Germany that really has it all, it would probably be Weimar. We were here briefly the other day, and now I'm back again for a weekend, with a concert on the Sunday evening. After all the driving over the past couple of weeks, this was an absurdly fast and easy journey. I flew from Stavanger at 3 yesterday afternoon direct to Berlin; within half an hour of landing was sitting on a train and by 8 o'clock was walking down those cobbled streets towards my hotel. The streets and squares that were so picturesque by day are lit up in the evenings by the flickering candles on the tables of countless street cafes, while little groups of students sit on the cobbles in the main square eating improvised suppers, much of which seemed to be bottle-shaped. I don't think I've raved about any town since visiting Venice (see p.92 of my stories), but this place is just heart-stoppingly lovely. The grassy river bank that I mentioned earlier forms a tiny section of a vast park, consisting of the "Park on the Ilm", built around the house that Duke Carl August gave to Goethe in 1776, and the Belvedere Castle gardens laid out by Ducal behest in the 1720s (Duke Ernst August, nephew and confusingly joint ruler with the Duke that had recently put Bach in clink), which between them follow the river for miles out of the town. In the cool of early morning, after stopping at the bakery for a coffee and extremely self-indulgent chocolate-filled croissant (written small so that Tracy doesn't notice) I set off along the gravel paths through this park, admiring the succession of riverside meadows, formal 18th-century buildings, gardens and grottos and expressing to no-one in particular my surprise at how many of Weimar's residents were out doing the same thing, or jogging, cycling or being otherwise energetic, and still had to give up with only a tiny fraction of the park explored. But here's a funny thing — on my way back I walked through one of the cobbled squares, where I passed an ordinary red postbox set into the wall. So ordinary that I walked on for a few yards before suddenly stopping and retracing my steps. It really was a red postbox, complete with the words "Royal Mail" and "E II R", set into the wall and cemented in place as though it had always been there. I almost put a postcard in it just to see whether it would arrive, but I wasn't sure whether to use a German or British stamp.
To round off an evening that consisted mostly of hours of practicing (less out of need than because it was a lovely organ) I sat at one of the candlelit street cafes and tried out a most unlikely local speciality — a brioche filled with chocolate ice cream and then cooked in a kind of toasted sandwich maker. Then, suitably fattened, I went in hunt of my red post box, just to check that I hadn't been hallucinating earlier. I found it where I'd left it, and this time noticed a little plaque on the wall to the effect that the postbox was a gift in 1993 from the good citizens of Stratford upon Avon, where it presumably had been surplus to requirements when they closed down the post office there.
The concert was fine (and yet again the church was full - how do they get so many people to organ concerts in Germany?) and the journey home was swift and uneventful - a direct train from Weimar to Berlin Central (the train was continuing to some north-coast holiday destination so it was full of families with suitcases and suncream), a local train out to the airport and a swift flight home. Now home for all of three weeks before heading off to ... mid-Germany for some more concerts.
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13 August - Final week of school holidays!
Back to normal routine on Monday, though for Katie this will involve a move to upper school.
Same building, but new teachers, routines and subjects as well as some additional pupils
(from the small school in Bjerkreim that doesn't have an upper school).
14 August - As the ørsdalen cricket season is now drawing towards its final over, Katie and Tim spent some time with bat and ball in the garden. No strawberries and cream at teatime, but plenty of other fruit (click photo, left, for pictures). And organ-pipe-shaped birthday cake in the evening.
15 August - good friends arrived from Germany to stay a few days (the same friends that we didn't get to visit further up this page, but we were forgiven).
A long game of Monopoly in the evening (click photo, right, for enlargement).
17 August - Katie treated the younger members to a nearby theme park to which she had been given some tickets, while the adults walked up the steep path to the Månafossen waterfall and then across the very beautiful uplands beyond. To reach Mån (and it has to be said at this point that the word "Mån" normally means "moon" in Norwegian, so the signpost pointing almost vertically up the mountainside indicating the direction of "Mån" seems almost to have its own sense of humour; and when on our return a man asked me how far it was to the "Mån" it was on the tip of my tongue to say 385000 km, only I thought better of it) we drove up the specially-constructed road into the mountains, parked in the gravel car park and set off up the track. Where the going is particularly difficult there are artfully-built wooden stairs; elsewhere, successions of chains are bolted into the rocks for you to haul yourself up with. Most people are very pleased to get as far as the waterfall, recover from the considerable exertion and admire the large amount of water falling 300 feet and then scrabble thankfully back down to the car. We carried on up another path, also steep and precarious in places, into the Måndalen Valley (which is not dissimilar to the uplands around the other Måndalen, where we used to live) before arriving at Mån itself, high up in the mountains. It's very picturesque, but what is really fascinating - quite terrifying, really - is that until 1915 there were two farms there. In those days there was no convenient road to the foot of the mountain, no wooden steps or chains. It would have been a day's hike and a very difficult and dangerous climb even to get down to the postbox. At each farm there lived a family until 1915 - husband, wife and multiple children; nine in one instance. The husbands of both families were killed in unrelated accidents at the end of the 19th century (it was not a risk-free environment), but the two wives carried on, looking after their respective farms and raising all those children in such immense isolation.
19 August - our friends return to Germany with this evening's boat, but on their final morning we went for a walk along Austdalen (the valley directly behind our house)
(click photo, right, for pictures).
Katie back in school. The autumn routine begins!
22 August - The start of term is often marked by the school class taking a walk together in the mountains. Today, in glorious sunny weather, Katie's class was taken by bus to a spot close to Bjerkreim church, at the far end of the ørsdalsvatnet Lake, and told to walk back to school alongside the lake and round a couple of mountains - a walk that would take the whole school day. Katie and I were going on somewhere after school, so when they were due back I parked the car at the end of the road near the school and walked a little way down the track towards the lake - hence the photos of a tired class returning from their day (click photo, left, for enlargements).
In the evening, Tim (together with some of his students) played for the opening of a new organ in Egersund - a very pleasant event.
23 August - where do the odd socks go? The answer is evidently down the side of the settee (photo, right - click for enlargement). On opening up the sofa that Tracy is restoring, we found a large sum of money in old coins, a lonely green sock, pens and a whole bin-bag full of assorted junk. But at least the restoration work is under way!
Thomas Andrew has been busy felling and splitting logs, which we're now sorting and cleaning up, ready for the long winter that we really don't want to contemplate yet.
But he's done a fantastic job, as usual (photo, far left - click for enlargement).
24 August - horses are pack animals. Thomas Andrew has upgraded his car - to a Galloper 4x4, just like Tim's, except that the registration number of the beast is different. It arrived today, and the two are now parked together (photo, near left - click for enlargement). We're expecting some confusion amongst the neighbours.
Emailing Tracy? Due to technical problems with Tracy's email, please use [email protected] rather than .info for the time being.
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25 August - . Speaking of computers playing up, I wasn't asking that much of my computer when it gave me this message earlier today. See you on 11 October!
And here is Fudge, making sure he gets his five-a-day.
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28 August - We've not reported anything from the media for a long time - the Norwegian news has been very slow this summer! We were both impressed and a little disturbed, though, by the spoof advert (a German student project) for the car with the safety system that "predicts dangers before they arise"; with quite unexpected and thought-provoking consequences. In case you've forgotten the significance of the location (Braunau am Inn) you can revise it here; the film clip is here.
Tim's car is struggling enough with the present not to worry about the future, but it is booked in for yet more surgery tomorrow (a pair of new driveshafts), in the hope of curing the rattling that plagued our Germany trip.
30 August - Car has returned, rattle-less and healthy ... we hope!
During the summer, Thomas Andrew did a good deal of work at his school.
Paid (real) work, that is, not "school-work".
Also working at the school was a team of builders, trying to get a major new extension finished by the start of term.
Thus it was that he witnessed a problem in the making.
School staff were carrying books into what was to be the new library when they were stopped by the builder.
The conversation went as follows:
"You can't put books in there - the floor won't take so much weight!"
"Can't put books in it? This is supposed to be a library".
"Not according to the plans - here it says 'Information Centre'".
That, it seems, is the trouble with giving things fancy, modern names.
So when, on the first day of term, the headmaster said in his welcome speech that
the school had a new information centre "and it will be exciting to see to what use it will be put",
Andrew and a few teachers burst out laughing, to the puzzlement of most of the other students.
It will, as he said, be exciting to see what they can use a library for when it can't contain any books.
Apologies - a few comments have been lost from this page (and probably a few emails as well) because our server has been moved over the last couple of days.
This will hopefully provide greater reliability in the future, but at the cost of a bit of mess now.
There's also a bit of a mess on the E6, where people have found a big rock today.
The photo (right, click for enlargement) shows a local resident who seems to be trying to move it,
but the rock is evidently better at "sit" and "stay" than at "walk on".
In the evening, the ladies of ørsdalen (the kvinneforening referred to by Thomas Andrew as the kvigeforening - let the Norwegian reader understand)
went for an outing to Sogndal - the coastal area just the other side of Egersund - where they spent a pleasant evening eating seafood and putting the valley to rights.
Tracy brought back pictures (click photo, left) and enthusiastic descriptions - but apparently the road there is worse than the road to get to ørsdalen!
