…we bought Svenseid station. How time flies.

Well so far so good, we survived our first winter here, a winter with unusually large amounts of snow and the house kept us warm and dry.

Here’s to the next year.

To all a content 2018 with many good nights sleep.

This picture was published in our local paper, Hallingdølen early in 2010 (before we moved here) and received a commendation in the yearly Newspaper and Magazine Awards.

The story behind the picture is that of an elk that managed to jump in through the sitting room window of an elderly lady, living in Ål in sheltered accomodation. The elk became extremely stressed as it could not find the way out, and you don’t really want a large, stressed elk in your house. So she wandered down the corridor to find a neighbour who was a registered hunter. He came with his gun and put the elk out of its misery. 

On a similar theme, I found this video from the 8th of February of this year. Looking at the relatively minor damage to the car I suspect that the driver was able to brake before hitting the elk. Also in their favour was that they were driving a large 4×4 and the laminated windscreen was probably bonded into the window frame. Your average adult elk weighs between 300 and 400kg, which is as heavy as four adults and not something you want to hit at any speed.

The outcome would have been quite different if the car had been a normal passenger car and/or the car had been travelling faster at the point of impact. You can understand why temporary signs warning of the danger of elk crossing are placed on the main roads during winter.

We’re quite lucky in that our bathroom actually has a bath in it. However, it drains into a hole in the floor that, with an air trap in it, that, every couple of months or so, needs to be removed and have gunk taken out of it. If we don’t do this then the bath will eventually stop draining properly and water will spill out onto the floor.

Unfortunately, the only way to get the to the air trap is to slide the bath across the bathroom. Last night we did this and this morning the bath drained as it should.

On the way back from skiing up on Golsfjellet I noticed that the Syncro’s temperature warning light was flashing like mad. We stopped in the centre of Gol and I crawled under the van whilst Damae went off to get some antifreeze. I found the leak, and we made it home without any further drama (well assuming the engine hasn’t been damaged). I checked the hose where it was leaking to find that it was just a jubilee clip that had worked loose. The RV 51 is very rough at the moment with chewed up snow, deep ruts and washboard road surface in many places. I’m assuming that the jubilee clip worked loose in the last couple of trips up the hill.

So today, I am going to walk down to Biltema to pick up eleven bottles of antifreeze, drain the Syncro’s cooling system properly and then refill with the fresh antifreeze and copious amounts of water. It takes more than eighteen litres to fill it, of which nine litres is antifreeze.

Whilst it isn’t the sort of problem you want to have to fix in the midst of winter, we’re quite glad that the leak hadn’t happened up on Golsfjellet. It is also fortunate that the temperature is only -4’c today, still not a pleasant temperature to be doing such work in but a lot better than -20’c.

Wish me luck.