Back in Norway - family, new apartment and new adventures! - 20th Sept.'23 to Jan.15th'24

After we moved out of Papaki on September 18th, we visited Kai's sister and stored everything that had been in the boat. Here we also have storage from earlier 😏.

After a few days there, we continued and visited our mothers, before we went towards the mountains and our cottage, which is our temporary home.

It was nice to get to the mountains, but after only a couple of weeks we were on the road again, this time to Stavanger and a birthday celebration for Ask, 3 years old 😍.

Both Ask and Eira were completely familiar with the fact that "farmor" and "Dassa" (grandmother and grandfather) were babysitters all weekend - which was lively, since there is activity from morning to evening, fun 😅😍.

On our way to Stavanger, we had the opportunity to inspect our new apartment in Tønsberg. It should be ready for takeover at the end of January 2024. It wasn't finished, but it was possible make some measurements and it looked like it was going to be very nice 😃.

After Stavanger, I (Monica) fell ill with a severe cough - not Covid, but it took time to get rid of it.

There were some more stuff that we (Kai) had to help family with, so we took another trip both to his mother and his sister.

We also took a trip to Dombås where Kai and his sisters have a small cabin. Here we had some snow, not enough for skiing, but we had a nice walk in the snow and also up to Viewpoint Snøhetta.

It came quite a bit of snow at our cottage also and since the beginning of November we have been able to go cross country skiing - there have been many nice skiing trips.

We really like it now, with winter and snow after 2 years of water, sun and heat 👍.

We were visited by Carlton, a sailing friend from England whom we met on our sailing adventure. It was Carlton who lent us his apartment when we were 2 weeks in Portsmouth waiting for our boat.

The plan now was to spend 2 days at the cabin in Dombås before we were to be at our cottage. Kai and Monica drove up to Dombås first, but due to problems with charging the car in minus 24 degrees Celsius (frozen 😳), we drove back down and picked him up in Lillehammer instead and spent the entire visit at our cottage.

The first day we were out on a 7.5 km of cross country skiing , which was very impressive as he was very untrained in cross-country skiing, if he had even gone on cross-country skies before 👍😃.

Kai and Carlton were also out snowshoeing, and they also took another ski trip where it was easy to see Carlton's progress from the first ski trip.

It was very cold, minus 13-15 all the time, so much of the time was spent inside. We played "Mexican Train", a fun domino game, and enjoyed good food and drink and a lot of talking 😃.

At the beginning of December, most of the family (on Kai's side) gathered in Odal'n for Christmas porridge. It was very nice, as there were also some we hadn't seen for a couple of years.

After 2 years in the Caribbean, we were looking forward to Christmas celebrations in the mountains with cold temperatures and white snow ❄️, and family visits 🤩.

Our children, daughter-in-law, 2 grandchildren and Kai's mother celebrated Christmas with us at the cottage. We had 4 days with lots of noise and play and full focus around the children - we had a blast 😍.

We were out cross country skiing with the children in sleds. Everyone joined in decorating the Christmas tree on the evening before the evening😃.

In Norway, Christmas is celebrated with dinner and presents on Christmas Eve. This is a "difficult" and exciting day for young children. They have to wait through a whole day and look at all the presents that are right there under the Christmas tree, and even with the intention of limiting the amount of presents, there were still a lot 🤷‍♀️.

We also have dinner before we start with the presents - it's almost "torture" for the little ones, they don't understand this since the presents are already there 😏😥. - so the children got to unpack a couple of presents during the day 😍.

We were also on a Christmas visit to Monica's mother and her husband and Monica's brother.

Before the New Year's weekend, we managed 2 evenings "free" 😂, before Dennis and a friend, Harald, came up for the New Year's celebration.

It had a very pleasant New Year's celebration 😍.

Daniel and Sandra took over their new house on January 3rd 2024 and after a final inspection of our newly built apartment in Tønsberg, we picked up their new, used electric car and drove 2 cars down to Stavanger.

This was just when we had a very cold period in southern Norway and the electric car's range was thus almost halved, so we had to have many charging stops along the way 😏🤷‍♀️.

We stayed in Stavanger for 4 days and helped with washing down the old house, unpacking in the new house++. Daniel and Sandra have bought themselves a great, big house 😀.

It is nice to be able to help and very nice to spend time with the grandchildren, Ask and Eira 😍.

We took the drive back to our cottage across Hardangervidda. It was a bit less cold on the return drive, so we "only" spent 12 hours 😃

Now we have had 2 weeks at the cabin with some packing and preparation for moving to a our new apartment.

We will get the keys to the apartment on January 22nd 2024 - how it will turn out will come later....😃.

New adventures on the water also await. On January 29th we travel to Indonesia, but now as crew on a 55-foot catamaran sailboat together with our Canadian friends Jeannine and Kevin🤩.

Update will come when we are back home 😃.

Monica og Kai Robert