Vibeke's birthday and a lot of rain

Back in work with a fairly full on week. Was out on Wednesday night with some visitors from the UK at an extremely understated restaurant in Bergen. Seven courses – yep 7, each with its own wine, all tasted great. It took 5 hours! The bloke on the table next to us fell down the stairs in a most spectacular fashion, all sorts of slow motion smashing glass and crashing around. It may have been the wine, but more likely that he had seen his bill. I was very glad not to be paying ours until Gregor played the “I’ll pay, no worries”, closely followed by “oh they don’t seem to accept diners club” (does anybody?) so I got landed with debt of a third world country on food for 9 people – but it was jolly fine and the visitors were impressed.

For the weekend we headed up to Myrkdalen for Vibeke’s birthday. Had been watching the weather for a week and it promised snow, snow and more snow! Arrived Friday night, ate lots of pizza and drunk some wine. Next morning was beautiful blue skies but a very icy mountain. Conditions were less than ideal for boarding so I headed to climb ice with Sandy. The ice falls were all fat but melting so went to board and the mountain was too icy. Hmmm not icy enough to climb but too icy to ski. You have got to love western Norway in January.

Had an ok day in the end, at least it was good to be out on the snow, we found some patches of wind blown powder and did runs across the crusty bits in between. We had a party in the evening, which was all very civilized. Vibeke got a list of 30 tasks for her 30th year, the last of which was to keep a blog of the other 29 – will she manage?

It started snowing in the evening so everyone was psyched for Sunday. Sunday morning it was somewhat of a let down, 2 degrees and raining! Who stole all the snow? So much for the weather forecast. Headed back to Bergen, with Emma counting the tunnels between Voss and Bergen. There are a totally of…. Nope I am not going to say, she is going to write a review for this blog, I couldn’t still her thunder. Now its Sunday evening and I am sat in the lair with the fire blazing and a wet pussy purring - outside it is 7 degrees and raining very heavily.