1 May - on the slopes - Coming home from today's 1^st May service I noticed that there were people coming down the main ski slope. Which was odd since all the snow has gone in this week's warm sunshine. They just can't keep away (photo, left; click for enlargement). As I'm writing (well into the evening) there's a deafening bleating outside the window: the sheep have just moved out from winter quarters and into the field by the house.

We, on the other hand, are not so desperate to be on the ski slopes, so we just had a walk along the other side of the valley (photo, right; click for enlargement).

Congratulations to those who guessed correctly: the answer to the "quiz" the other day was D — in the course of 10 years this "blog" has served up almost exactly quarter of a million words!

2 May, Beautiful May - It's been the warmest April ever, I've changed the tyres on the cars early, the sheep are out and have taken up their positions in the middle of the road — and are now wondering what on earth has hit them. Here is our balcony this afternoon.

3 May - Woke up just at the wrong moment, in time to witness a fortunately brief flurry of snow that sent Tracy rushing off in her car in case we got snowed in today (we both have funerals to go to). Immediately afterwards the sun came out and it abruptly became a normal (if rather chilly) spring day again ("Snow?? Nah, not here, Guv"). Nevertheless, it's a good day. We have flights to Berlin booked for Sunday evening — with SAS, whose week-long strike has just been called off during during the night. So, given that it takes a day to get all the planes and people back in the right places, they'll just have settled back into a normal service by the time we're leaving.

4 May - Day trip to Tysvær to visit Lilly's family (who are also lovely). We also drove up to the church where The Wedding is to be held next year and explored the area a bit. (Photos, left).

9 May - Thanks to peace breaking out at SAS, we've now been in Germany for a few days and — although we've both got work to do — are starting to unwind. Today was forecast to be rainy (though in the event it was 18 degrees and sunny) so we had a shopping trip to Neubrandenburg (the nearest moderately-large town). May is asparagus season in Germany (with a side order of strawberries), so every 50 yards or so along the road there is an asparagus stall ("field-fresh asparagus"), all competing for attention, the best prices and somewhere to stop the car. And in the town centre, there are little huts along the streets, each specialising in either asparagus or strawberries. As we walked into the shopping centre, the little cafe by the door announced today's special on its board — asparagus pizza. (Photos, right).

It was an educational shopping trip: I (Tim) was taught how to shop for shoes, the female way. Avoiding the blandishments of asparagus we went into the shoe shop in the shopping centre, on a quest for "some black shoes for work". As we were heading in through the door, Tracy picked up a pair of black shoes from a stand. "I've seen these in two other shops and really like them. They're so comfortable. Just exactly what I need. It's a real problem, really". It was that last comment that revealed to me my lack of shoe-buying education, and I noted that the shoes were replaced on the stand as we headed further into the shop. After a brief foray into some yellow, cork-soled sandals, Tracy settled into trying on some red shoes. At this point we noticed that we were being shadowed by a threatening lady, who was muttering to herself as Tracy picked up shoe boxes. The lady came up to us and said something indecipherable. We've become sufficiently used to the local dialect that we can understand most things, but this lady might have been speaking Russian. I gather that in the East-German days she used to work as an enforcer for the Stasi, but they let her go because she was too scary, which is how she came to be working in the shoeshop. For the remainder of the time we were there, she walked three paces behind us at all times, and muttered. "In the olden days, we used to have apparatus that would have adapted your feet to fit those shoes". When she demanded to know what size Tracy wanted I was sufficiently cowed to admit to it being a 38, which earned me a filthy look from Tracy. "Don't encourage her!" But it was all right, because they had no size 38s. We moved on in procession to some jazzy flip-flops, which Tracy tried on, before heading into rows of black shoes in a variety of different makes, from which Tracy (while our Minder was momentarily distracted by some other surveillance that needed doing) somehow extracted some bright red strappy sandals, which we took with us, before trying on some white shoes. "It's a shame there are so many black ones", said Tracy, "or I could have had red". Our Minder wanted a translation and didn't get one. "Do you have these in 38?" "Nein!. These ones? "Nein!". As we worked our way slowly up the other side of the shop we had a foray into yellow and green, broad, flat sandals, but by early afternoon we got back to our starting point and unearthed a pair of those original "ideal" black shoes, in a size 38, no less. Unfortunately there was another nearby aisle which had been missed, so Tracy found three or four other competing varieties there, for all of which size 38s were unearthed. Our Minder was wilting by this point, and I nearly sent out for some coffee, or asparagus pizza, for her. At that point, Tracy suggested that I sat for a moment on a convenient husband chair, while she did another complete round of the shop to see what new deliveries they had had in since the first lap. By tea time we were reunited at the husband chair, with the bright-red sandals, a new pair of black sandals ("the waterproof lining will be great for rainstorms in Cambodia") and the "perfect" black shoes. "I'll take the sandals", said Tracy, putting the black shoes back down by the door and heading off to pay.

When not shopping we're enjoying all the usual sights of German spring, such as the road at Drosedow surrounded by yellow fields.

12 May - Nordic flying - Berlin isn't really blessed in the airport department. We normally fly with Norwegian from Stavanger to Berlin Schönefeld — sometimes direct, sometimes with a stopover in Oslo. For all its well-known failings, Schönefeld is easy to find your way around and out of. This time, though, we needed to leave Stavanger on a Sunday evening, which meant that we had to fly SAS to Berlin Tegel, with a stopover in Copenhagen. Tegel is not an easy airport to navigate (it took us an hour and five sets of directions just to find the car-hire office) and it is surrounded by a road system that was designed by a three-year-old in a hurry. We're all looking forward to the opening of the new Brandenburg airport in 2011 (or 2021, or 2031). You probably know the history: the airport has been under way since 1991 and after many misadventures hoped to open in 2007, but, well, you can read the whole sad story here. But none of that was the cause of our protracted flight home. The SAS route back celebrated the company's trans-Scandinavian identity by taking us to Copenhagen via Stockholm, before going on to Stavanger. If that doesn't sound eccentric when you say it, try looking at it on the map. A real Nordic tour, but now the sun is shining to welcome us home.

16 May - aw! - It's one thing to be travelling out of the way in Scandinavia by air, but quite another to be doing it by car, as a couple of Chinese tourists apparently found out this week. Many years ago, when we were spending a couple of months in the village of Os in Norway's eastern Ørsterdalen Valley, my dad came by car to visit us. I'd given him detailed directions on how to get out of Oslo (where he was landing by ferry), but he made the unfortunate mistake of asking for directions at customs ("just to be on the safe side"). What he didn't realise is that the letter "O" in Norwegian is pronounced "ooo" (so he really wanted to go to Ooos), while he pronounced it "awes" — which in Norwegian is written "Ås". So he spent a couple of happy hours driving southwards towards the town of Ås, instead of northwards towards Os, before he realised that he wasn't arriving at any of the places I'd listed on his instructions. These Chinese tourists, though, managed to do even worse. They knocked on a door in the compactly-named village of Å because they couldn't find the address they were supposed to be going to. Hardly surprising, really, because they were in the village of Å that is one-third of the way up Norway and should have been in the in the village of Å that is two-thirds of the way up Norway. That might not sound like such a big deal, but as you can see from the Google route map, the difference between the two is 21 hours of non-stop solid driving (and Google always painfully underestimates the time it takes to get places in Norway) in addition to a 4-hour ferry (which only runs once or twice a day). You certainly can't do it less than three full days (and even then you have to be lucky with the ferry). You have to feel sorry for them!

19 May - more flying - Naturally, we don't get to stay still for very long. Tracy is off to Poland for a conference tomorrow. As she has to be at the airport for 6.30 in the morning, we decided to stay the night at the lovely Sola Strand hotel [their website film takes a moment to load], a historic (opened in 1914) wooden hotel 10 yards from the beach at Sola — a couple of minutes' drive from the airport. So on Sunday lunchtime, after our services in Sandnes, we made for the beach and spent a few hours being toasted in the hot sunshine (people were swimming in the sea!) before a leisurely evening in elegant surroundings. A much easier start in the morning!

It's always interesting reading the local paper for Neustrelitz (where our flat is in Germany), because hardly anything ever actually happens there. A few weeks ago the ambulance had a minor crash at the bottom of our road because they'd got a new siren and a local car driver was "distracted by the unfamiliar noise", but on the whole the news stories tend to be about lost cats and things. Today's main story is about a great tit that is nesting in someone's postbox (photo here) and the problems this is giving the postman, while recent stories have been concerned with larger birds — the annual arrival of the storks. One of the storks (or, presumably, the latest representative of its family) has just arrived in the garden of the Maaß family for the 82^nd successive year (news story here), while in another part of town, the "stork cafe" has turned on its big screen which is connected to a webcam pointed at a stork's nest.

Early-morning mist.