LILLEHAMMER

8 August

We had a lovely walk in the morning in Fagernes (Scot had a bit of a run) and then sat and had a coffee before going back to the van for breakfast.  It was a wee bit cold for a swim again with a cool wind blowing.  The temperature is always at its warmest later in the day around 4-5pm strangely enough.

We get on the road and after asking another camper about a road we were uncertain was good enough to travel on we headed off for Lillehammer.  We took the road that was less than the highway and going up the first mountain was ok, but the road deteriorated on the way down, it was a bit narrow and the surface wasn’t the best but the road then improved and stayed good all the way until we got back on the highway again.  The highway up to Lillehammer was busy – it seemed everyone must have been out for the weekend.  We stopped and bought a couple of rolls for lunch, which unfortunately turned out to be fruit buns.  It is difficult to know what things are if you can’t recognise the names of them and we sometimes make mistakes with what we buy.  We have nearly mistaken pork in one place for turkey it looked quite alike. We still ate the buns with our smoked salmon and salad and they were fine.

We arrived in Lillehammer and it was so busy.  We only knew where one camp was so we stopped outside the first McDonalds we had seen since Bergen (they just don’t exist outside the cities) to find out where the other camp was.  After going down a few wrong streets with very narrow and low underpasses that we wouldn’t have fitted through we eventually found the second camp.  We booked in and decided to go for a walk along the lake front and into the town centre.  The girls at reception told me it wouldn’t be a good idea to walk up to the ski jump area here as the whole town was on a hill and you wouldn’t want to walk up the hills.  They clearly hadn’t come across un-lazy people like us.  The lake looked good enough for a swim but I didn’t think we would be back from our walk in time.  We walked up into the town but ended up in a dodgy area where things were graffitied all over but it was ok, it was still daylight and we eventually found the town area.  The ski jump area wasn’t that far away but it had been a bit of a long walk up to the town trying to find a footpath beside a road we could walk on.  A few of the roads didn’t have room for people to walk along so we had to find other roads.  In the town we saw one of the really dodgy vans we saw in the freedom camping area we stayed in, in Voss.  There were about 10 guys in the van – a lot of them quite young.  They obviously travel around.  We walked around the town area which didn’t look bad, but my impression was that this place had had a lot of money spent on it in 1994 when they had the Olympics but bits of it had been left to deteriorate and looked quite poor which was such a shame as it could still be an amazing place.  We stopped and had a drink in the main street, but for a Saturday night there were very few people around.  We walked back to the campsite and found we had a bus full of French people as neighbours.  I thought they looked like a church group of some description, but from their actions I don’t think they were very Christian people.  One of the ladies emptied a childs potty out right beside our campervan – how disgusting.  There are toilets not far from us for that.  Plus they kept coming to stand right beside our van to look at the view – which wasn’t really that good and talking so that when we put our lights out they annoyed me.  I am tolerant to a point, but these people were something else.  They also had a poor baby that didn’t stop crying for 3 hours.  Poor baby, but it didn’t seem like anyone was trying to help the baby stop crying.  They were gone in the morning, but that didn’t matter so were we.  We drove up to the ski jump area to have a look.  How amazing to look up at the jump.  When you see it on the tv it is so different to seeing it up close.  They had a chairlift for anyone who wanted to go to the top but they also had stairs from the bottom to the top of the jump.  A few people were walking up the stairs so we decided to walk up to the top.  There were 936 stairs to the top and some of them quite steep as the area the skiers fly over gets almost vertical at one point.  What a climb and what a view from the top.  We went to the top of the jump tower where we looked down.  OMG is all I can say.  I think you have to have amazing guts to take off from that when you look down.  They had plastic brush type stuff over the jump area and lush grass at the bottom which they were wetting.

We were so lucky because as we were looking down at the jump we realised there were two young guys about to practice their jumps.  They can still practice without snow as the plastic is slippery and they run water down the tracks they slide down before they jump.  What an amazing thing to be able to watch these guys.  We thought they may have been practicing for the youth Olympics next year, but they were just out of that category and they were trying to improve for the main Olympics.  Wow what a treat.  We watched the jump from the top, then we walked halfway and watched from there and then again from the bottom as we climbed back down the 936 stairs.  I have posted some of the photos I took and because the jump is much bigger than it looks in the photos you have to really look for the guys jumping in the middle of the photos.  When you look at the whole jump, you can just make out the people who are walking up the side of it, they look like ants.  One of my pictures I took on the side of the steep part of the jump so you can see just how steep it is.  Scot thought he had balls racing sidecars until he watched these guys take off down the slope.  We think you must have to start as a very young child to get over the fear you would have when you look down that slope.  Such a special treat.

We drove out of Lillehammer and were going to see the bobsled track but it was getting on a bit so we went up to a camp ground a bit north of Lillehammer and stopped there for the night.  Unusual there were few campers here.  I think most people are starting to go home as the holidays are nearly over.  It is lovely and quiet here.  We found out they had saunas in both male and female shower blocks so since there wasn’t anyone in them we had a sauna together in the female one, you aren’t supposed to, but what a waste having a separate one.  That was lovely and necessary to sooth the muscles after doing 2000 steps today.  A lovely dinner of Thai chicken curry and off to bed.  Tomorrow we are off to Oslo.