Photo Op

NK and friends on a play day in the snow!

My own little super hero.

NK testing the snow shoes.

Somebody is no longer a white belt!

The same somebody now has braces!

JH skiing across a high meadow.

A view of the lake in the background.

NK sledding.

A snow and ice slide coming down off our roof. Notice the ice daggers. Wicked.

We live somewhere on the other side of the lake above the point to the right.

Willow buds! Wow!

An old fortress in Kongsvinger (note the sign) high on a hill. This is not far from the Swedish border. In the old days it was used to guard against invasions from the East.

NK sledding in our yard.

Me and my paper doll, Flat Stanley. He came from Palau. We took a lot of photos and then sent him and the photos back to Palau (2000 miles south of Japan).

A forest along the Swedish border.

Norwegians go to Sweden to buy groceries because Norway is CRAZY expensive. This is one of the MANY stores along the border...food for low prices!

The Swedish-Norwegian border.

My Christmas cactus blooming in February. Everything is weird in Norway.

Images of Snow - UPDATED!

I have been listening to my friends and family in the American Midwest talk about snow, so I thought I would share some photos of our snow. This is the snow next to my garage.

This is a photo of JH getting our mail. You can see our snow sticks. The sticks help us find our driveway when the snow piles up. We have a farmer who regularly clears the snow after we get 4-6 inches. Sometimes we get a foot or two before he roars up the street and into the driveway.

This is the view out my second floor window. The snow has piled on my second floor deck! Yikes!

This is the deck at our friends cabin. We went to stay for the weekend to downhill ski since it is on the slopes and about 75 yards from the ski run. Of course we had to dig our way in!

This is the front of our house. Talk about snow!

Another lovely view out my window.

This is a tree in the forest above our house.

A nice view of the sky after the sun dipped behind the mountain. You can see ski runs in the distance on the other side of the valley.

JH and NK skiing!

Our garage looking like it has about three feet of snow on the roof.

Another ski photo.

Shoveling snow off the roof.

Ski runs in the valley.

NK resting between ski runs.

Hello bird.

Tenerife - UPDATED

Norwegian schools call Spring Break "Winter Break", and since it almost always looks like winter in Norway I know why. For NK's "Winter Break" we went to Tenerife, Canary Islands. For more information and links to Tenerife and the Canary Islands look down a post.

Although part of Africa, the language of the Canary Islands is Spanish. I speak Spanish...well, I did, before I learned Norwegian. Now I can't get my brain to process Spanish. I try and out comes Norwegian. The languages are so similar. Similar verbs, similar vocabulary, they both use gender identifiers. So, each time I tried to speak to the locals, I sounded "Norwish". And, since zillions of Norwegians spend vacations in the Canary Islands, people in restaurants and shops know basic Norwegian. Even menus and some signs are in Norwegian. Funny...huh?

We love Tenerife. NK wants to go back...to stay! The weather was fantastic, it wasn't crowded. We felt very safe and the people are kind and hospitable. A lovely place - and we will definitely go back. One of the few cheap things in Norway (IRONY) is the airfare of out Norway. Air travel is very affordable...and worth it! Since Norway is not my favorite place to be, I am glad the airfare to escape is reasonable.

NK had so much fun. My in-laws Ole and Eli went with us and NK really enjoyed hanging out with his farfar. This is a photo of the "boys" in one of the many arcades.

We spent a lot of time on the beaches and walking around the island. In this photos above I snapped a photo of the sun setting and by the time my stupid camera clicked the sun was gone. So funny!

NK and JH are paddling around in the surf. Lots of little (and big) kids spend the day in the waves. There is an artifical barrier wall about one hundred yards off this beach and it keeps the under current managable. A real safe and family friendly beach...and it was just a block from our little villa.

This is a photo of JH and me standing along the coast. Tenerife is full of tourists from the Nordic countries and the British Isles. Nk had fun meeting other kids - and with all the Scandinavians yaking everywhere it sounded kind of like, well...Norway!

The Canary Islands are volcanic islands with a volcanic soil mixed with sand that blows across the short distance from the Sahara in mainland Africa. We saw a lot of wonderful plants and flowers. I just loved looking at the blooms and the stems of the different species.

During the bike ride from hell (see the other posting) we rode through vineyards (we drank a lot of local wines!), citrus orchards, banana plantations and potato fields. Strange combination, but the rocky, strange soil is conducive to growing each of the plants. At one time the islands grew a lot of tomatoes and tobacco. We saw some tomatoes, but they were small fileds and small tomoatoes, the smallish more exotic varieties. I guess I didn't notice any tobacco.

NK wanted to be on the beaches...

Could it have been the beautiful topless girls...well, maybe.

Tenerife really caters to the tourists. Lots of little Nordic boys were bungy (did I spell that right?) jumping. NK was laughing and speaking in Norwegian to some of the other boys.

We spent a lot of time here under these little palapas. For about $15 a day two chairs and a palapa were ours!

You can see that it wasn't crowded. I guess tourism is down 10% due to the down swing in the global economy.

This is NK and me strolling around on our first day...notice my white legs! We were standing outside one of the MANY restaurants on the beach front promanade. We ate great food. Lots of local sauces. Strangely enough, many restaurants make bland food to appeal to the Northern Europeans. Yuck! Bring on the spice. I tried to convice the restaurant staff to aadd the spice...and they did and we tried some great sauces and some local dishes including rabbit.

NK was so good. He loved this trip and because he was such a great helper we were able to do some fun stuff and feel safe.

Tenerife was so clean and attractive. The local people were so proud of the place. I kept asking them how close to the beach they lived, and they all told me that they could not afford to live anywhere near the beach, but that on Tenerife everyone had a beach view. True. The average annual income is around $15,000. I am sure the beachfront area is expensive to buy, but on a small island with mass transit, it doesn't take long to get to the villages outside the tourist zone. And even the villages are starting spas, vineyards and eco-tourism. I really enjoyed the villages we rode through on our way down from the crater of Mt. Teide volcano.

This is a view of the neighborhood around our resort looking away from the beach and towards the mountains.

And a nice evening looking down from our balcony to the pool. I was only at the pool once, with the beach I have little interest in a pool. And, thousand year-old tourists reserve the chairs at sun-up each day and lay there until sun down. It was like a ritual. They were happy...so why try to nab a chair?

I love this photos. I love Tenerife.

Sadly, we are flying away from Tenerife in this photo. I snapped some great photos of Mt. Teide. Imagine we started peddling above the snow line in the National Park. Poor NK, he cried and cried because we were freezing, but we we fast down the volcano and through the clouds into a rainy ice storm with thunder and down through the groves and orchards and to the beach. An amazing trip.