Drammen to Geilo

Friday, 6 February 2015

After a very brief but nice stay back in Drammen, we reloaded the car with our luggage and some very useful borrowed ski gear and most useful of all, our very own handsome Norwegian chauffeur. Here he is helping Jon stuff the car..

Amazingly they were able to close the boot after all that..

Lars-Henrik has a lot of experience driving in ice and snow so he drove us up to Geilo while the other Verde-Thon car had to wait until after the passengers had completed their day jobs.  We early-leavers arrived in the middle of the afternoon with the back of the car looking like this as a result of the last hour of wind and snow:

Funnily enough the sides and front were find but the back had more than an inch of snow attached!

Geilo is a fairly low key ski resort halfway between Bergen and Oslo.  There are lots of cross country trails and downhill trails, but most excitingly, the Ice Music Festival is on this weekend which is what drew us here in the first place. We've hired a great and spacious apartment from airbnb for 1/4 of the cost it would be in an equivalent ski town in Australia so we're looking forward to relaxing and enjoying everything about this place and this event. 

Our apartment is on the forth floor of a building with a supermarket in the bottom.  So we could do this..

Yep, we bought stuff in the supermarket, then just took the trolley all the way home - it was more amusing than it was practical actually! 

So after a cross country ski on skating skis around the local lake (about 10k), which nearly killed Jon and I who are really amateur ski-skaters at best.  At the same time Lars Henrik had trouble going slow enough for us to keep up. In the end he just went ahead then turned back every now and again.  I think on one of his trips ahead of us he had time to get a haircut and on the other he was able to sit down for a three course dinner before returning.  Something like that anyway. Nevertheless we survived to make it home, have a quick dinner, then go out to our first official event of the Festival..

Some kind of weird singing and seemingly random instrument playing and a bit of growling as well. The instruments were really interesting and fun to watch and hear them be played - there were ice drums, xylophones, horns and a stringed ice instrument. However the music itself was really odd and I didn't love it. I'm hoping for something a bit more um..musical.. tomorrow night.