One Sunny Day in Sunndalsøra

This was supposed to be our last weekend in Norway, or so we thought. We had decided we better spend it somewhere cool with some cool people. Beautiful Sunndalsøra about 2 hours drive from Trondheim with our great trip buddies Helen and Ally seemed like a perfect plan.

Of course we were already in a mad scramble trying to organise ourselves to leave Norway over the previous month, since we have been back from France.

We also fitted in a crazy Friday night mountain bike adventure with Tim and Ally up Vassfjellet and some weekday orienteering. We flew down to Oslo for the Norwegian Orienteering Nationals, Helen did a nice write up of that on her blog.

I got a bit carried away with the delicious blue berries on the way up Dronningkrona

The day was amazing, one of the crispiest, clearest days I have ever had here. Helen and I make our way carefully up the loose and freshly snow covered boulders.

We found a nice little house on the way up with a sunny porch to sit and admire the view

Looking down the back side of Dronningkrona to the glacier below. The early autumn snow had fallen quite low on the hillsides, further down the trees were still golden and red.

We descended beside the glacier via the route which Chris (aka Garmin Bear) was sure would be better than our ascent route. Much to our sceptisim it actually was!

The boys striking a pose!

The descent was pretty long and steep (Dronningkrona is 1816) - although we didn't quite make the top because we were worried it would become dark before we got down! The evening sunset on the Sunndalsfjord was beautiful.

We drove around the fjord and installed ourselves in the local DNT hut Brandstadbu. The hut was a really nice one, in the forest and a perfect cosy size. We had a yummy dinner including polishing off some tasty port.

On Sunday Ally and Chris had to run back up to the little hut from the previous day -Ally accidentally left his fancy camera up there! Camera safely retrieved, we returned to Trondheim from our fun weekend trip to face the maelstrom of packing our flat and organising for our departure to New Zealand via Nepal.....

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Journey Through the Baltic

Image
After the Rogaine we spent another fun night at the local farm stay with the other Kiwis, then headed away in the morning with Julian, Jana and Sylvia in a large silver hire van. Most of us were pretty hobbly (with the annoying exception of Chris and Julian) so we drove back to the nice wee town of Otepa and spent the day hanging out in a pizzeria and visiting the 'Canyon' the largest in Estonia apparently... This photo is actually from before the Rogaine in Tallinn when Viv had the brilliant idea of hiring the terrifying 'Octibike', it proofed a highly entertaining and attention seeking way of zooming round Tallinn. We camped in a deserted campground and it was truly freezing, so the following morning all feeling chilled to the bone we decided to find a nice cabin for that night. We drove to the town of Tartu and wandered through its pretty cobbled streets. We took a visit to the KGB museum and saw grim pictures of Ghettos in Siberia – after which we definitely n
Read more

Cloudy Peak Mission

We've been back in New Zealand for 5 months now and I haven't managed a single post! The shame! The trouble is not lack of fun trips to write about, it's lack of time afterwards to do it! I have started studying again and seem to find zero spare seconds in my day. Nevertheless, I am determined to do some trip posts again. Since Christmas there have been several 'highlight' trips, one being a 5 day sea kayak adventure we did in Marlborough Sounds, another was a week's mountain bike orienteering carnival down in central Otago. But the one which I really want to write about on here was an amazing trip I did up Cloudy Peak with my friends Grieg and Clare. It was the same weekend as Sprint theBays Orienteering up North, which Chris had decided to do. We decided we needed to do a really good trip to make him jealous. We had a three day weekend, and I foolishly left Greig entirely in charge of the trip planning without paying the slightest attention to what he had in m
Read more

Good Godzone Prep! The Takahe Traverse

Image
An exploratory adventure in Fiordland with its remoteness, steepness and dense bush holds a definite allure for those of us who enjoy that sort of thing. Since back in 2004, when we bush bashed down the Neale Burn, swimming at times up to our necks in the meandering river to avoid the near impenetrable bush on either side, packrafting seemed like the answer to Fiordland travel to me. So, with this thought in mind (and knowing that in a few months we would be racing Godzone in this exact territory), a group of trampers (myself, Chris, Nick, Dan, Georgia, Patrick) jumped aboard a watertaxi and hooned across North West Fiord in late December with a mission in mind. Our Route Earlier in the day, after frantic packing in Queenstown, we had received our certificate of 'didymo checked' from the DOC office in Te Anau. The water taxi man eyed the certificate suspiciously. He looked at us sternly, clearly unconvinced by our humongous packs, running shoes and light hearte
Read more