Snøhetta and a rather grey Week

I was itching to jump on my bike again and hoon through the forest testing out some new skills after all that riding in Italy, but the rain just kept pouring down!

In Trondheim it was about 12 degrees, Chris had work to do and I was wondering why I wasn't still in Italy? Fortunately I managed to occupy myself by catching up with some friends, reading 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo', and completing another painting for our wall.

On Friday we started to look into hiring a car for the weekend because we were heading down to Lillehammer to pick up my brother Alastair and his girlfriend Amber who were flying in from New Zealand. The cars were all so expensive to hire and we hadn't been looking long when Chris said "why don't we just buy one instead?" 5 hours later we bought a second hand Toyota Corolla from a couple living round the road from us. It seems ok, so here's hoping! At least it was pretty cheap.

The next day Ally proposed a walking trip up Snohetta, the biggest mountain on the Dovre Plateau, several hours drive southeast of Trondheim. I decided this sounded like fun, so I agreed to join him. The road into Snohetta is only open for a few months a year - otherwise it is a long ski or bike ride in to the base of the mountain.

Receding glacier on the way up the mountain

On top of Snohetta
Great views along the ridge

We had a nice day roaming up the big rock covered hillside to the top of the barren mountain, along with lots of other people who obviously thought this was a good plan too. The real highlight of the trip was spotting a whole family of these crazy musk ox things that I had never even heard of before on the way out! They look little woolly mammoths with funny horns which come from their squashed heads - very cool.
The musk oxes! From a safe distance

We got back late on Saturday night, then on Sunday morning Chris and I headed away from grey Trondheim to go down to Lillehammer and meet up with Al and Amber.

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