It's Good To Be Home

We’ve stayed at Odd and Turid’s house every time we’ve come to Norway, so there’s no place in all the land that feels more like home than their house. They are gracious hosts and they swear it’s no problem we are here as long as we need to be. With Kory in the hospital and Kaleb with friends, it’s only me they have to put up with for now.

Kory is feeling no pain today (see photo). He was all smiles and his normal disposition when I visited him this afternoon (they have very limited visiting hours.) The fact he was completely still all night and day and they are giving him some good pain medication that doesn’t cause him to be sick, made all the difference. When he leaves the hospital, I hope he doesn’t have a set-back as he’s progressing nicely now. Many prayers are being said so we’ll take it one day at a time. The doctor that saw him today said there is no way he’s going home this week, and maybe not next. He will write a note to the insurance company so they will pay for the change in our tickets. The doctor also asked if he needed a note to get disability pay as he won’t be fit for work for a while. Kory just laughed. The accident happened the day after his permission to work here expired, and even though he’d quit his job before we left on vacation, he would still get disability pay if we were still legal residents. Norway is THE place to be when anything out of the ordinary happens. Yesterday I ran into Sandra, a friend from my Norwegian class. She just had a baby ten days ago but it came seven weeks premature. Because of that, her husband gets time off with full pay until the baby’s due date in September, then he can get the normal three month maternity leave after that. (The baby is doing well, but it will stay in intensive care until its due date so Sandra and her husband need to be at the hospital every day.) Norway knows how to care for its people.

I went to Filadelfia Church this morning without Kaleb as he didn’t want to leave his friend’s house. It was good to see so many familiar faces and to hear an inspiring sermon. Cousin Kari stood in front of the congregation and prayed for Kory. I love to hear that woman pray – she just pours it out from the bottom of her heart and I was in tears by the end of it. I was in tears most of the service anyway as I started thinking about leaving here and I got very sad. Right after church I went over to our old neighborhood and had dinner with Sabina and her mom, Tone, and a few others. Tone is one heck of a cook and I was sorry Kory couldn’t be there as she made leg of goat, and that’s something he’s never tried before and he would have loved it. I had to speak Norwegian the whole time so it was good for me to get back in the swing of it as we didn’t speak Norsk too much while we were on vacation. (One city we were in had a lot of beggars and gypsies approaching people who spoke English and asking them for money, so we kicked into the Norwegian mode to avoid being accosted. It worked great.)

Kaleb called as expected this afternoon asking for another sleep over with a friend but I thought it best he wait and get a good night’s sleep tonight before having another sleep over tomorrow. He wants to be with friends night after night, but I know he doesn’t get much rest and I hate for him to get sick from lack of sleep. He spent all afternoon up in the mountains with his friend Andre’s family, picking blueberries, so I was glad for that because I also know he usually sits for hours on end playing his Nintendo when he’s with his friends. I picked him up after dinner and he went with me to Agape Church’s evening service. When he fell asleep in my lap during the sermon, I knew I’d made the right decision to have him home tonight.

Currently Odd and Turid are out on the deck, sitting by candlelight, all bundled up, drinking wine and talking. It’s a nightly thing in the summer around here even if it’s pouring down rain (everyone has an awning). One of Odd’s common sayings is “If it’s summer, we are outside.” In the winter, they don’t have that option too much, so they make the most of every summer night, no matter what the temperature. When we were staying at a campground in Denmark, we had Norwegians all around us and sure enough, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, they were sitting outside eating. Even after the kids where in bed, people were sitting outside watching the rain by candlelight. Kory and I never sat outside even once as it wasn’t warm enough by our estimation and tonight I’m inside writing and everyone else is outside. We may have lived a year in Norway, but we have a long way to go before we are Norwegians.

A Road Trip (or as the Norskies would say...Kjøretur)

Since nothing new showed up in the paper today for us to go look at to either rent or buy, our host cousins, Odd and Turid, decided, rain and all, we should take a road trip. The Tall Ships Race had landed in the town of Måløy, several hours south of here, and it was decided we should go see the ships in port. Just as I woke up and before I understood the plan for the day, we were out the door in a caravan of cars full of cousins heading south. I lost track of how many ferries we were on or how many tunnels we went through, but I know we went through the world’s deepest tunnel (nearly a thousand feet under the water through the bottom of the fjord). There was a sign before entering the tunnel that said they would send us a bill for 79 kroner ($16) in the mail for the privilege of going through it (it just opened up three months ago.) I guess they send you the road and tunnel tolls the same way they dish out traffic tickets via the road side cameras.

In Norway, the final destination is NEVER as important as the trip itself, as the landscape that unfolds around each corner is worth every penny we spent coming here. I had several great “drive by shootings” as I call them – where I hold the camera out the car window going 50 miles per hour past some incredible landscape, and shoot. Today was a bit more challenging because I was in the backseat and my window doesn’t roll down so I had to hold my camera out of the front seat passenger window and couldn’t even see what I was aiming at. But it rarely mattered as any old “point and shoot” in this part of the world generates a photo worth framing (the above photo is proof of that but maybe we were only going about 40 mph.) There never seems to be time to stop and properly frame a shot, as most ferries are timed so that you can catch them all perfectly if you go the speed limit between them (and there’s nowhere to pull over anyway).

We left around 11:00 this morning (yes I slept in as I was up til 2:30 last night trying to get the blog posted… the internet here isn’t working anymore on my computer…) and it’s now 10:00 at night and we just got home. We stopped to see the tall ships for only about 90 minutes – if that gives you some clue as to how much we were in the car today. We went all the way to the next “state” so it would be a similar day trip going from say, Seattle to Salem, Oregon and back again… except that there are no freeways and you’re on a road that if you drift off just a snitch to the right, you’d go crashing down to your death at the bottom of the fjord. Some of the roads are only wide enough for one car so I’m glad I wasn’t driving as there are often no guard rails, either.

Kaleb cried today because he is out of books to read. We were hoping our boxes would be here by now (I shipped four boxes of books and I know it won’t be enough) but they won’t show up until the 14th (we hope). He’s read every book we brought at least three times this week but I had a few surprise books tucked away in some suitcases, so that pacified him for now. I doubt he saw much of the scenery as he was perfectly entertained reading books. He did ask me to tell him before we entered a tunnel so he could hold his breath, but when the tunnels here go through several mountains and can be over five miles long, that childhood entertainment becomes downright impossible.

The ships were beautiful and the town was jammed packed with people. Even hearty northwesterners might have been deterred by the hard rain we had all day -- but not Norwegians. They have a famous saying that, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes,” so they were out in droves. Kory felt the trip was worth it because he got to eat one of his favorite Norwegian foods – whale! He found a street vendor making whale stew and he dove right in. Norway is so proud of the fact that they kill those majestic creatures that one of their politicians designed a T-shirt with a drawing of a whale on it that says, “Intelligent people need intelligent food.” Kory bought ten of them a few years ago and gave them to the Makah Indians to wear when they go out on a whale hunt (he had a co-worker friend that’s from that tribe.) I haven’t noticed that eating whale meat has made him any smarter, however.