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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