Lillehammer and smell of snow

As the sun set the temperatures fell immediately, and I left the beautiful place for Lillehammer, the famous olympic town with Maihaugen, the huge open-air museum.

The ride cross-country (via Dokka) was scaring and wild again, now the vegetation changed from the rather common birches to those huge ancient, sometimes even rotten fir-trees one knows from the oppressing paintings of Kittelsen .

Going towards Lillehammer along the Mjøsa total blackest darkness captured us again, the traffic went very slow for no one could see anything, strange. After another long search in between shopping centers and industrial areas in the dark I found a nice Motel/Camping by the water, everything easy, I had a warm bed (freezing temperatures and smell of snow in Lillehammer..) and an opportunity to wash my clothes.

Maihaugen was enormous, tons of original buildings from all regions and periods to see, there's even the Garmo stave church (amazing inside + outside) they bought and installed on the museum's areal to prevent it from being destroyed by some ignorants who wanted a new church and needed the ground...

What they went through

And one learns a lot about the norwegian history which is quite different from ours, it's rather a people of pioneers (just look at Leif Ericsson, the son of Eric the Red who discovered America around 1000).
Mangeled by an inhospitable nature, they got used to a hard life and were struck by many desasters. One of the worst and most incisive was the Black Death that came from an english ghost ship (just like I mentioned in my book, so the theory I read in an english book on the Black Death first is supported in Norway as well). That ghost ship, full of plague-corpses, was cruising up and down the Norwegian coast during winter only to strike in spring 1349 in unloading it's letal freight and destroying more than a third (!) of the population. The formerly upcoming economy was pushed back into a period of horror and the Norwegain people was wastedly vegetating along. Finally, fifty hard years later, the Norwegian King declared the bankrupticy of his realm and handed all over to the greedy Danes, who violently exploited everything that was left from the country in agony.

The Norwegians as a people never really recoverred from the fatal consequences of the Black Death; totally weakened by the Danes they failed to succeed during the very important period of Enlightment, when european states and economies fixed their positions in the world. The Danes were incredibly rude - they even prevented education and forbid the norwegian language - everyone had to speak and write Danish; still nowadays the Norwegians search for their "mother-tongue"; the officially used language is bokmål, that's like Danish, but new reactionists try to restore a Norwegian hybrid, nynorsk, that's created from western norwegian dialects, but no one uses it.
.
The developement of Norway also was hindered by it's dimensions - a huge territory with little fertile regions and a population spread in an unprofitable way - whereas the North was almost empty, the South was 'overpopulated' by the end of the last Century - this all leading to great streams of emigrants, seeking for a better life in America.
At least they're getting back a certain pride, they'll need that in "Europe".
Enough of that - lets go back to the trip.

The SS in a cage

The Maihaugen museum has an impressive exhibition going on about the history of Norway from the beginning (you walk through caves of ice, dead people lying on the ground, stone-age men hunting, then the suffering from the Black Death, all covered with violet mattery stains in a tiny hut, rats all over the place until you finally hear the Führer speak and Stukkas dashing down - the Third Reich exhibiton is very neat, too (they even have a carnival-copy of an SS uniform behind a fence.....). It's all done with love, that's most important.

The web-cam at Lillehammer

One important spot was the little Torget in Lillehammer. I knew the position of the web-camera there and so I had a pic of the hearse fixed by Alex who was currently online to save the various web-pics you'll see later on. Right after that I went to the internet-cafe round the corner to have a look at 'us' - there it was - everybody had a great laugh about the pic on the screen.

The Gågate in Lillehammer is very cosy and tells of the wintersports and Yule-habits, very nice shops, unfortunately closing at 5 pm (!)

Inititally I had planned to drive up to Trondheim, then Røros and eventually Tromsø - but as the snow was not far from Lillehammer I changed my plans - I'm not used to the weather up there - who knows, it might snow from one minute to the next.

Watch the climate once you're there...

Norway has two climates anyway - the westcoast is influenced by the Golf stream (that enables the Brits to exist as well....) and has thus warm, wet winters, no strong changes in temperatures, but no snow, much rain (Bergen is the town in Europe with the far most rain...) Without the Golf stream Norway might not be populated, if you look at a map how far north it really is....
On the other hand the eastern part, that's situated behind the massive range of mountains that rises alongside the country, has rather a continental climate, warm, sometimes even hot summers, cold snowy winters. And all this happening in the far north - so I'd not take any risk to waste my car (or even life) in some road ditch up there..