So, my last blog post ended with us seeing our new country from the deck of the ferry. However, we were still a long way from home!
Some people hardly make the same mistake twixe. I am not one of those people. Twixe is considered a pretty good score when it comes to making mistakes in my book! In this case, I already had made the mistake once that Norway = home. It's not. Our home is still about a day's drive from wherever you enter Norway. And since we arrived a couple of days before Midsummer's Night, a day's drive is a rather stretchy concept...
On the plus side, though, the girls had definitely stretched their legs on the ferry. And Julie, well, poor Julie just had to hang in there for a little longer! In any case, she should relish the fact that she was in the back of the claustrovan, rather than cooped up in quarantine at Norwegian customs. You know, with my form-filling-capabilities, being banned from entering Norway was a very plausible scenario for our fur baby!
The first obstacle on our route was Oslo. When Menno and I drove to Trondheim, we got to Oslo around 5pm and made it past Oslo at 7.30pm (that's right, 2.5 hours for 25km). This time around, we got to Oslo at least an hour before that! And, again, made it past Oslo at 7.30pm. I will have to look it up, but I think in Norse mythology Oslo is the God of Congested Traffic...
It is after tedious Oslo, however, that the truly "fun" part of the journey begins. Because between Oslo and Trondheim lies a 500km stretch of pristine 2-lane highway (yeah right...) that winds its way between the mountains and valleys. Glorious vista's await you. If you dare take your eyes off the road for 2 milliseconds that is. I never dared. Because to me, 2-lane highways, with trucks, are my worst nightmare.
I consider myself to be a cautious driver. My friends refer to me as a senior driver. In fact, some have suggested my driving style could use a little cayenne pepper. And, I know, I should drive faster. But I am too darn scared of ending up in a car crash. Plus, I need to be a cautious driver, since my girls are relentless at getting my attention while I am driving. Not a good situation (and I truly need to work on that!).
So, driving 2-lane traffic in a country that I have never been in before, with humongous trucks all around has me sending prayers to whatever deity cares to protect my family from imminent death. I try to stick to the speed limit, but usually I drive just a tad slower than that. Resulting in angry trucks driving up so closely behind me that I can almost hear the driver cursing this blasted tourist car that is blocking their way. The trucks coming from the opposite direction are obviously not hindered by my lack of speed, so they give a new meaning to the expression "trundling down the hill". My teeth rattle every time a truck passes us.
Luckily for me (and the girls) I am not the only driver and my dad is about as experienced a driver as one can possibly be. Still, it took a looooooong time on those winding roads. We took a different route when driving up with the girls than I did with Menno, so the promise of perhaps seeing a moose to the girls proved to be an empty one. Insert grumpy girls here. For the most part, though, the girls were great! They read their books, listened to their audiobooks, chatted incessantly (Eluin) and happily accepted all the goodies grandpa offered them (oh, the novelty of a bag of mars/snickers/bounty/twix mini's!).
But of course no trip with young kids, and Ms. E in particular, is without incidents. She waited until we were about 2 hours away from our final destination to work her magic. We had been driving for a very long time through Norway's endless forests when we all desperately needed to pee. Unfortunately, gas stations, or rest areas with a washroom, were few and far between. In this particular case too far between. I saw a sign for a gas station and took the exit off the highway. Alas...the gasstation proved to be for farm vehicles only and there was NO washroom. But, as the gas station was in the middle of the forest, we decided to embrace our inner forest girls and go au naturel!
Jura and Nori still need a little help when it comes to peeing in the woods and I was rather pre-occupied with my own pelvic floor muscles to pay sufficient attention to the danger that has just climbed out of the van. It was only after I got out of the woods myself that I saw Eluin in getting ready to make a big mistake. She was standing at the edge of the road with her pants around her ankles, her hands on her hips and a determined look on her face.
The thought crossed my mind that she was about to pee, but surely she knew she needed my help...or at least squat. I picked up my pace, told Eluin that she had to wait for me. To no avail, of course. As I was clambering out of the bushes, she assured me that she was fine. "I can do this mom!" And she started to pee. Standing upright. All over her pants and shoes. I yelled: "What on earth are you doing, you need to wait for me so I can pick you up!" She looked at me angrily and said: "I don't need you to pick me up, because I can pee just like him!" (at which she pointed at grandpa). Pee like grandpa. That's right. That's what she did. In fact, the phrase "pee like grandpa" has become an expression in our household to explain the kind of "I can do this" plans that can only end badly ;-)
With relatively empty bladders and dry pants for Eluin we made it HOME! Menno was waiting for us and although it was well after midnight, it was still light enough to unload the van. I still need to bake a cake for the entire neighbourhood to make up for the racket we made that night. We put up a bed in the playroom, grandpa had a bed in the basement that was left by the previous tenants and we were all asleep within minutes!
The next day, me and the girls had to go to the police station to get our "personal number". Menno had picked June 16th a couple of weeks before as a random date. And although it was through factors which were outside of our scope of influence that we ended up in Norway on June 15th, I still take pride in making it to that particular appointment! I mean, it is the first and foremost thing we had to do when entering Norway, it takes about 3 weeks before you can get an appointment, and we managed to that on our first day home. How's that for efficient planning?
The rest of the days that my dad was in town we unscrupulously used his added benefits (huge van, lifelong experience with assembling IKEA furniture, great cook and grandpa-pur-sang) to whip our home into liveable shape! And I have to say, we managed quite nicely! Our shipment from Canada arrived on June 16th as well. And so the great unpacking could begin, and the girls were finally reunited with all their pretty stuff that they had missed for so many months.
All good things must come to an end, though, and before I knew it, I had to go and pick up my brother from the airport. I am forever grateful to my dad for driving us up to Norway, but I am equally grateful for my brother flying all the way out to Trondheim, just to have a cup of coffee at our newly assembled kitchen table, before driving back to Holland as my dad's co-pilot.
And now we're here. Without family and no friends. We have met some acquaintances with serious potential in the friendship department, though, so that's good news. Nevertheless, I have felt lost now and again. And I have lost my kids now and again. Our living space has almost tripled in comparison to Canada, so I am not always completely sure where my kids reside. Especially when they have sneaked off with an iPad ;-)
Norway is our home and I will work my way through these awkward first months, just like I did in Canada. Trying very hard not to compare these first months with my first months in Canada, though...'cause that would still just hurt too much.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Monday, July 4, 2016
On our way to Norway
Spoiler alert: We made it safely to Norway and have been living here quite happily for almost 3 weeks now :-)
After moving from our apartment in Vancouver, to our friend's basement suite, Menno moved out to Norway in March. The girls and me moved to Holland in mid-March. Poor Julie had to stay behind for a couple of weeks until I came back to Vancouver for 5 days of absolute kid-free bliss and picked her up.
One would imagine that between moving from Vancouver to Holland and moving from Holland to Norway, the girls and I would experience a little lull in the moving hustle and bustle. The opposite was true. Because I refused to turn our home in Haarlem into our homebase for our time in Holland, we decided to stay at relatives and house sit where possible. The benefit of this was that I did not have to refurbish our home in Haarlem to accommodate 4 people and a dog, nor that I had to work my behind off to keep the home in semi-respectable state for possible viewings of the property. The downside to this plan was that we never slept in one place for more than five nights in a row. Which also meant that I had to squeeze every drop of nomadic spirit out of my wannabe-Gypsy-genes to keep things fun (for the girls) and slightly organized (for me).
It probably does not come as a surprise that after a couple of months of this trooping around, things started to fray a little around the edges. However, at the end of May, things started to look up! The sale of our home was approaching it's final stages and Menno had managed to find a great family home in Spongdal, a small town in the countryside that surrounds Trondheim. It was my dad (who will be the guest star in this particular junovancouver episode) who hatched a plan to make our start in Norway a little more easy.
He suggested that we could borrow his car for the first months in Norway, so we had a means of getting around town. He also suggested that Menno and me would drive said car to Norway and that I would stay there for a couple of days to get to know our future place of residence. Thankfully our family, yet again, offered to provide the necessary child care to make this trip a possibility.
So, off we went. In a cute, little, yellow Kia Picanto. We left the Netherlands at 5pm and quickly sped through Northern Germany on our way to Denmark. We planned to cross the bridge connecting Denmark to Sweden and drive up to Norway (and then up to Trondheim). Added bonus of our trip was, that our little car doubled as a relationship pressure cooker. When you have a relationship where one talks too much and one talks too little, and you keep those two apart for an extended period of time, things can grow askew. Good thing that it took us close to 24 hours of solid driving to get to our destination! By the time we reached the outskirts of Trondheim city, we had managed to reach a new equilibrium.
Trondheim took me by a storm, a beautiful old (and cold!!!) city on the coast. After seeing our future home (and meeting the amazing people who were the tenants!), I could totally imagine us having a great time there! It was during those days in Trondheim that we received the news that the people who had placed the highest bid on our home had had a positive outcome of their talk with their financial advisor*. Thus, in a matter of days, we had a timeframe for our move to Norway. We would start driving up to Norway only 2.5 weeks after I left Trondheim!
So, back in Holland, it was time to get serious about packing! My dad had offered to drive us, and our belongings, to Norway. He pretty much went as far as to buy a new 7-seater-cargo-van for this adventure! The prospect of having a lot of cargo space had made me quite greedy... Not only were we planning to bring some furniture from our home in Haarlem (dining room table, chairs, queensize bed + mattress), we also had to accommodate all 10 suitcases that we brought in from Canada. Not to mention the books, tableware, blankets and bikes for all three girls that I had acquired during our time in Holland...yikes.
After packing, repacking, leaving some things behind and packing again, we managed to get our little moving van ready for departure. We had booked a ferry from Hirtshals, Denmark, to Langesund, Norway. Because we were not sure how the first leg of our journey would go, my dad came up with the idea to use the mattress we were bringing and turn our moving van into a makeshift campervan.
Do you see that mattress? On top of it, barely visible, we stacked Jura and Nori's bikes and a stepladder to allow me to climb on top of it. After the rather uneventful drive to Hirtshals, Denmark, we decided to forego the pricey option of sleeping in a hotel and try out the claustrovan!
So, after dinner we drove around town to find a good place to park. On our way to the ferry harbour, we encountered a rather eerie scene. A large grassy field, on which several RV's were parked in a circle. Behind virtually every RV's window, one could see the flickering of TV's playing inside. We arrived rather late and we are, of course, a travelling circus without a tent. Which means we are loud. Always. First off, we had to unload the stepladder, then unload the bikes and lock them beside the van. I had to unearth the pillows and duvet from the rubble in the back of the van. Nori took one look at the space available on the mattress and decided to sleep in the front seat. So, I had to take out all the car seats in order for my dad to have a place to sleep in the backseat, too. Oh, and to add to all the clamour, Julie was incessantly barking, too stressed out after being locked up in a crate for hours at a time.
However...
There was no sign of life from any of the RV's. No one pulled back their curtains, no one even peeked out their window! Throughout the night, we made more racket than I had hoped we would. Eluin had a rash on her back that had gotten infected, so she tossed and turned like the dough hook on a kitchenaid. Nori and my dad got cold halfway through the night, so my dad decided to use the van's independent vehicle heater... In order to start that, though, he had to get out of the van (zzzzhhhjingggg-klunk of the sliding door), open the driver's door, start the heater, shut the driver's door (schklunk!) and close the sliding door again (zzzzhhhhjingggg-schluck-zzzzhhhhjinggggg-zhhhhhhhhjing-schluck-zzzzzzzhhhhhjingggggg-zzzzzzzzhhhhhhhjinggggg-KLUNCK). Yup. That sliding door never closed properly the first 2 times around. Oh, and the heater shut off after 20 minutes again. So yes, we were loud. Yet, the next morning, NO ONE told us off. No one even showed their face!
When we left the RV-campsite, I realized something... Back in Canada, I thought RV's were the most glamorous, and safest, way to enjoy camping. On many a camping trip, I lay in my tent, softly whimpering while keeping a close ear on the sounds outside my tent. In my mind, it would only be a matter of minutes before a bloodthirsty bear or cougar would jump onto our tent and devour us all. I remember cursing our hubris for not dishing out the dough needed to rent an RV, a fortress of steel and convenience. In Europe, however, bears are scarce. One can camp in a tent and worry about little more than mosquitoes and whether the neighbours can hear your farts. One does not need a fortress of steel and convenience to survive. In Europe, RV's are kinda lame. And, judging by our experience at the RV campsite, I would say there is a high probability that RV's are the preferred mode of transportation for the undead...
Anyhow, I ramble. The night in the claustrovan passed without much ado and soon we were on our way to the ferry terminal. In line for the ferry, Nori gave a snore-by-snort account of the difference in snoring techniques of Menno and my dad ;-) Soon we boarded the ferry and we spent 4.5 hours stretching our legs, eating Danish pastries and "storming" (a verb Jura and I invented for chasing of seasickness by standing on the windiest, rainiest spot on deck :-) ).
And there it was... Our new country, the place we get to call home! Rainy, cold, foggy, but nonetheless, THERE! We made it!
To Norway, that is. The story of the rest of the trip and our first impression of Norway will have to wait 'till some other time!
* Unfortunately, the buyers were unable after all to get a mortgage, so our house is back on the market. To be continued, for sure!
After moving from our apartment in Vancouver, to our friend's basement suite, Menno moved out to Norway in March. The girls and me moved to Holland in mid-March. Poor Julie had to stay behind for a couple of weeks until I came back to Vancouver for 5 days of absolute kid-free bliss and picked her up.
One would imagine that between moving from Vancouver to Holland and moving from Holland to Norway, the girls and I would experience a little lull in the moving hustle and bustle. The opposite was true. Because I refused to turn our home in Haarlem into our homebase for our time in Holland, we decided to stay at relatives and house sit where possible. The benefit of this was that I did not have to refurbish our home in Haarlem to accommodate 4 people and a dog, nor that I had to work my behind off to keep the home in semi-respectable state for possible viewings of the property. The downside to this plan was that we never slept in one place for more than five nights in a row. Which also meant that I had to squeeze every drop of nomadic spirit out of my wannabe-Gypsy-genes to keep things fun (for the girls) and slightly organized (for me).
It probably does not come as a surprise that after a couple of months of this trooping around, things started to fray a little around the edges. However, at the end of May, things started to look up! The sale of our home was approaching it's final stages and Menno had managed to find a great family home in Spongdal, a small town in the countryside that surrounds Trondheim. It was my dad (who will be the guest star in this particular junovancouver episode) who hatched a plan to make our start in Norway a little more easy.
He suggested that we could borrow his car for the first months in Norway, so we had a means of getting around town. He also suggested that Menno and me would drive said car to Norway and that I would stay there for a couple of days to get to know our future place of residence. Thankfully our family, yet again, offered to provide the necessary child care to make this trip a possibility.
So, off we went. In a cute, little, yellow Kia Picanto. We left the Netherlands at 5pm and quickly sped through Northern Germany on our way to Denmark. We planned to cross the bridge connecting Denmark to Sweden and drive up to Norway (and then up to Trondheim). Added bonus of our trip was, that our little car doubled as a relationship pressure cooker. When you have a relationship where one talks too much and one talks too little, and you keep those two apart for an extended period of time, things can grow askew. Good thing that it took us close to 24 hours of solid driving to get to our destination! By the time we reached the outskirts of Trondheim city, we had managed to reach a new equilibrium.
Trondheim took me by a storm, a beautiful old (and cold!!!) city on the coast. After seeing our future home (and meeting the amazing people who were the tenants!), I could totally imagine us having a great time there! It was during those days in Trondheim that we received the news that the people who had placed the highest bid on our home had had a positive outcome of their talk with their financial advisor*. Thus, in a matter of days, we had a timeframe for our move to Norway. We would start driving up to Norway only 2.5 weeks after I left Trondheim!
So, back in Holland, it was time to get serious about packing! My dad had offered to drive us, and our belongings, to Norway. He pretty much went as far as to buy a new 7-seater-cargo-van for this adventure! The prospect of having a lot of cargo space had made me quite greedy... Not only were we planning to bring some furniture from our home in Haarlem (dining room table, chairs, queensize bed + mattress), we also had to accommodate all 10 suitcases that we brought in from Canada. Not to mention the books, tableware, blankets and bikes for all three girls that I had acquired during our time in Holland...yikes.
After packing, repacking, leaving some things behind and packing again, we managed to get our little moving van ready for departure. We had booked a ferry from Hirtshals, Denmark, to Langesund, Norway. Because we were not sure how the first leg of our journey would go, my dad came up with the idea to use the mattress we were bringing and turn our moving van into a makeshift campervan.
Do you see that mattress? On top of it, barely visible, we stacked Jura and Nori's bikes and a stepladder to allow me to climb on top of it. After the rather uneventful drive to Hirtshals, Denmark, we decided to forego the pricey option of sleeping in a hotel and try out the claustrovan!
So, after dinner we drove around town to find a good place to park. On our way to the ferry harbour, we encountered a rather eerie scene. A large grassy field, on which several RV's were parked in a circle. Behind virtually every RV's window, one could see the flickering of TV's playing inside. We arrived rather late and we are, of course, a travelling circus without a tent. Which means we are loud. Always. First off, we had to unload the stepladder, then unload the bikes and lock them beside the van. I had to unearth the pillows and duvet from the rubble in the back of the van. Nori took one look at the space available on the mattress and decided to sleep in the front seat. So, I had to take out all the car seats in order for my dad to have a place to sleep in the backseat, too. Oh, and to add to all the clamour, Julie was incessantly barking, too stressed out after being locked up in a crate for hours at a time.
However...
There was no sign of life from any of the RV's. No one pulled back their curtains, no one even peeked out their window! Throughout the night, we made more racket than I had hoped we would. Eluin had a rash on her back that had gotten infected, so she tossed and turned like the dough hook on a kitchenaid. Nori and my dad got cold halfway through the night, so my dad decided to use the van's independent vehicle heater... In order to start that, though, he had to get out of the van (zzzzhhhjingggg-klunk of the sliding door), open the driver's door, start the heater, shut the driver's door (schklunk!) and close the sliding door again (zzzzhhhhjingggg-schluck-zzzzhhhhjinggggg-zhhhhhhhhjing-schluck-zzzzzzzhhhhhjingggggg-zzzzzzzzhhhhhhhjinggggg-KLUNCK). Yup. That sliding door never closed properly the first 2 times around. Oh, and the heater shut off after 20 minutes again. So yes, we were loud. Yet, the next morning, NO ONE told us off. No one even showed their face!
When we left the RV-campsite, I realized something... Back in Canada, I thought RV's were the most glamorous, and safest, way to enjoy camping. On many a camping trip, I lay in my tent, softly whimpering while keeping a close ear on the sounds outside my tent. In my mind, it would only be a matter of minutes before a bloodthirsty bear or cougar would jump onto our tent and devour us all. I remember cursing our hubris for not dishing out the dough needed to rent an RV, a fortress of steel and convenience. In Europe, however, bears are scarce. One can camp in a tent and worry about little more than mosquitoes and whether the neighbours can hear your farts. One does not need a fortress of steel and convenience to survive. In Europe, RV's are kinda lame. And, judging by our experience at the RV campsite, I would say there is a high probability that RV's are the preferred mode of transportation for the undead...
Anyhow, I ramble. The night in the claustrovan passed without much ado and soon we were on our way to the ferry terminal. In line for the ferry, Nori gave a snore-by-snort account of the difference in snoring techniques of Menno and my dad ;-) Soon we boarded the ferry and we spent 4.5 hours stretching our legs, eating Danish pastries and "storming" (a verb Jura and I invented for chasing of seasickness by standing on the windiest, rainiest spot on deck :-) ).
And there it was... Our new country, the place we get to call home! Rainy, cold, foggy, but nonetheless, THERE! We made it!
To Norway, that is. The story of the rest of the trip and our first impression of Norway will have to wait 'till some other time!
* Unfortunately, the buyers were unable after all to get a mortgage, so our house is back on the market. To be continued, for sure!
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