My First Camping Trip

Morten loves camping, being alone in the wood. He said it was so peaceful. Me, on the other hand, I had never camped before. The idea of not having proper toilet did not really lure me into camping before. He tried to convince me that camping was really fun, a good activity to relax. An ex-colleague of mine from Maine has told me about it, too. I guessed I had to try it, then. Unfortunately, we did not get a chance to do it when we were in the US. Well, we did sleep in a tent for a couple of nights in our garden when we were painting our house as we did not want to sleep with the paint smell.:)
So, one weekend here in Norway, we planned for a one-night camping trip. Just to give me an introduction of how it was to sleep out in a wood. We had some warming up first, sleeping in one of our friends garden for a night, then we headed up to Lillehammer area. Lillehammer was the city in where Winter Olympic was held in 1994. If you want to know more about the city, the internet link is http://www.lillehammerturist.no/english/. We have a friend who lives there who we were going to visit.
After we checked on a map and had an idea where we were going to camp, we drove to find the place. Unlike in the US, there are more places we can camp here freely. We can pretty much camp in anywhere we want, even though the place is privately owned, as long as it is not in somebody's yard or in a middle of a farm. It is rarely you'll find No Trespassing sign in this country. We aimed for a place that had no houses around and had water, lake or small creek. It would not be difficult to find such a place as Norway has a lot of lakes.
So, there we were, driving and trying to find the place. But ops, unfortunately, the road was closed. It was not surprising if the land was privately owned. Some people close the road to their lands if they don't want other people to trespass, for example. Unfortunately, it is not always shown on maps if a road is closed. We just had to drive there and check it out. And oh it started raining. It already passed 7 in the evening, but there was still light. We checked out around 5 places, until we found a perfect spot. There was a lake and no other people around. And oh...there were so many blueberries! And the rain had stopped, too! We had some companies, though, a small flock of sheep were curious watching us putting up our tent and unloading the car. They left us after a little while.
As we have not yet all unpacked from our moving from the US, we did not bring our camping cooking equipment. We just brought some bread and things to put on bread, and some drink. Morten preferred hot meal for dinner so he drove to nearby town to find some gatekjoekken. (Literally translated as street kitchen. Anyway, it's a small local restaurant, that typically sell fried chickens, hamburgers, and kebab.) I was left alone to contemplate that it was really nice to be out alone in the wood. He came back with a fried chicken and a hamburger that we ate while sitting on a rock next to the lake. We read a little bit inside our tent before we fell to a very nice sleep.
In the morning we had breakfast and clean our faces. I was thinking to swim in the lake but it was too cold for me. Then we drove to find our friend and we went to a forest up on a mountain to pick cloudberries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudberry). We did not succeed in picking cloudberries as much as we did with blueberries. It is not easy to find cloudberries. They grow in bogs, marshes and wet meadows and requires sunny exposures in acidic ground, and do not clump together in one place. It is a delicate berry in this country. If somebody found some cloudberries on a mountain, normally it would be reported that they saw a bear there (so other people would not go there). Anyway, the three of us together could only find less than 20 berries and most of them were stored directly safely in my stomach. Nevertheless, it was a really nice weekend with some new experiences for me.