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Tuesday Evening. Neset Camping. Have I said ‘…perfect day’ too often? At this moment I’m in a lovely cabin which is pleasantly familiar because I’ve stayed in it before (miss you, Lace) and it’s cold and windy outside on my private bit of lakeshore and warm and cozily-lit inside (as all the world should be…). Branches of the big fir tree out front are waving vigorously about and the moss-splotched boulder (where… Read More
Tone and Simon gave me an extra nice treat on Sunday—an all-day road trip around the southernmost points of Norway. Road trips being my favorite form of recreation, and a road trip in Norway being about as scenic as would be geographically possible—may I just say it was a perfect day. In our ten hours on the road we traveled by green fields pleasantly ornamented with white sheep and golden llamas and… Read More
There was that most pleasurable rainy ride from Stavanger shared in all of those raindrop photos—leading up to the best possible time in Kristiansand. My family here includes Tone, Simon, Oda and Erland. Tone is the daughter of my second-cousin, Gurine, whom I first met in 1985. I liked her so much; she and I agreed back then that if only we lived closer to each other we would become such good… Read More
I quite surprised myself by finding these photos of rain on the train window so beautiful. Hope you enjoy them. I do realize people from rainier climates might not find them so special…but New Mexico friends you may like a raindrop in your day.
The few photos that follow seemed to me to be more abstracted than even the rain-drenched group I called landscapes. So with my eye for art (that’s a joke, okay?) I thought they should have their own post.
Friday I took the train from Stavanger to Kristiansand. It rained hard, downpour-hard, almost all of the way. The trains are clean, cozy and efficient; the countryside is beautiful and yes, most beautiful of all, it rained—snakes and snails and puppy dog tails or, as my Norwegian dad always said, it’s raining pitchforks and ax handles! Of course I took pictures the entire three hours. Because when will I ever see this… Read More
Having family in Norway and Sweden is possibly the nicest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ve now visited often enough so that the country of Norway and my Norwegian cousins feel like they must have been part of my life always. With my newly discovered Swedish cousins it just gets even better. I’ve mentioned before pondering all of the reasons this extended family pleases me so very much and there are… Read More
Yesterday was photographer heaven. A sunrise to make you believe all’s right with the world and a day’s rain to confirm that. A sunrise outside my Stavanger window so incredibly beautiful I wanted to shed a tear or two from sheer joy or the fear that our determination to wrest every natural instance from the environment will block out rose-colored sunrises forever. So here’s 5:30/6:00 on a Norwegian early autumn morning. A… Read More
Cruise Ship Mania; 7:30am: I pulled the thick dark curtains shut when I went to bed last night. Now I stumble forth to draw them open upon a new day and… Voila! A massive take-over-the-world-cruise-ship (Independence of the Seas, registered in the Bahamas, capacity 4,370 passengers) has landed and the occupants are disembarking. My imagination is not that active—it’s why I cannot write fiction—but Leviathan was the word that immediately sprung to… Read More
It’s Day 27 of being a Norwegian and I’m almost feeling it. But then I touch on-line reality and remember I’m an American with a President Sleazy-T. I’m sad this evening. It usually happens a little sooner on these epic journeys but being in Norway has kept the inevitable down-day during any given month at bay. It’s not exactly depression or anxiety or physical-offness—more like I need a pajama day with eight… Read More