Adventures in the Snow

I know I have been a bad blogger! I have been feeling rather busy and stressed of late. Yes too stressed to even post on my blog. Strange but true. To make up for it I thought I would make a quick post showing some pics from recent adventures in the snow.

While we were in Tromso J and I both bought snowboards as a way to help us enjoy the winter. Unfortunately we did not have enough snow while up there to try them but since then we have hit the slopes every weekend at various places around Bergen.

It has been soooo much fun! Very painful at times, but really a fabulous experience and a great excuse to get out and see some amazing mountain landscapes.

Last weekend we went to the highest point between Bergen and Oslo called Finse (where they filmed the snow landscape in Star Wars: The Emperor Strikes Back).

We went for a friend's 30th birthday and while it is generally a flat place renowned for cross country skiing and kite skiing, we found a fabulous slope that we could hike up and snowboard down. We had some of the best conditions and best runs yet. It was really amazing. What was not so fun was our arrival on the first night. We got off the train in the dark at about 7pm and had to walk what we were told was about 2kms (actually turned out to be more like 4) on a path by the railway line to our hut. We were carrying backpacks full of food and wine and our snowboards, plus we had the dogs on leads. The Norwegians who had been there before lead the way and we headed off into the snow. Well, after trekking about 2 kms in what was knee deep snow at times the Norwegians began to get worried. The wind was picking up, we could still not see the hut, had never really found a path, and could not really see more than 20m in front of us. They decided we should turn back. Long story short, we got lost in blizzard like conditions for about 3 hours and had to be rescued by a man on a snow scooter. Our angel!

The snow scooter driver said it was too dangerous to drive us to our hut so we ended up renting another one closer to the train station. It was quite a dramatic beginning to the weekend! The next day dawned sunny though and we got some fabulous snow boarding so all was forgiven. We decided we liked Finse afterall. Here is me going up...

And me and J coming down...J is the one with style!



Anyway, hope you enjoy the pics from the snow and know that I leave for 4 weeks in Australia on Friday so this may be some of the last shots of snow for a while. No doubt J will keep waving the snowboarding flag for me!