I Like Big Water

Yeah I don't think this singing thing is for us

After a week of boating it was time to head to Lillyhammer for a 40^th birthday party of one of Rolf’s family members. Now we had come to kayak so we weren’t exactly prepared for a formal dinner party (at which everybody was dressed up for). If you only knew that three people in the room were kayakers then you could have easily picked out who we were. Although the fact that Eden was wearing bare feet made him pretty obvious and my ‘party’ shirt meant spotting me wasn’t exactly difficult. Rolf was the only one presenting a challenge. When you combined our standard of dress with the fact we were the only three people in the room who didn’t speak Norwegian then we really did feel out of place. Fortunately they made us feel very welcome anyway… good one ya Rolf’s family. And because they feed us so well we were only too happy to do the washing up.

Cheap import labour hard at work

One Norwegian tradition that we weren’t quite prepared for was singing during dinner… that’s right singing… and (you guessed it) in Norwegian. Everybody got a few sheets of paper with the lyrics to the songs that we were to sing. Well we could barely read the sheets let alone sing them, for English speakers pronouncing Norwegian words is not straight forward. I do have a new favourite quote though from one of the songs “Livet er ikke det værste man har, og om litt er kaffen klar”. I’ll let you try and figure out what it means!

Thor god of thunder tagged along for our trip

After saying goodbye to our new friends we headed for Sjoa and the Åmot run. A pleasant little trip down a narrow section with plenty of water… what better way to burn off all the cake we had eaten. And because it was ‘only’ grade 4 we figured we should play follow the leader to spice things up a little. First run down we took it a little easy but for the next two runs it was - plug the middle and get laughed at if you don’t make it… aye Rolf.

Not to be out done by Eden, Rolf found his own hole

Eden stepped it up a notch by intentionally trying to catch the biggest hole on the run… nice work buddy. Shame you missed your loop (and that there was no one ready to take photos). Not to be outdone Rolfy bear got himself a nice working on the last hole of the run… that’s funny Rolf it didn’t look like you were trying to end up in that hole!?! To bad for you the paparazzi were on hand.