Greenland Expedition 2010

Well, it’s about time I write something in our blog. For the first time since May, I’ve got my head above the water. In the middle of May, I bought a house just outside Tønsberg, the oldest town in Norway. At that time, my wife Ingunn was five months pregnant with our second child. We knew we had to sell our apartment in Oslo as fast as possible, and move into the new house before the beginning of September. You could say that the following months have been quite stressful for all of us.

During this period, the financial crisis hit us hard. We expected our apartment to be easily sold, but it turned out not to. We spent over NOK 30 000 on advertising online and in newspapers, had the real estate broker display our apartment approximately 20 times and sold it for 10% below our asking price after 3 months for sale in the open market.

The house was built in 1925, and we immediately started to plan how to redecorate the kitchen, living rooms and master bedroom. Well, it didn’t go that way. We soon realized that we had to build a new kitchen, tear down the old walls in the master bedroom and build a new one. The former owners of the house were serious smokers, so we actually had to paint the walls and ceiling in every room to get rid of the yellow tar stains and nicotine smell. During this period of time, we lived in my old bedroom in my parent’s house. This was quite a challenge, both for us and my parents.

We took over the new house on July 20th and moved in September 11th, four days before Ingunn gave birth to Magnus. That was a close call – puh! If you have small children, you probably know what I am going through right now – sleepless nights, unpredictable female hormones, the big brother being jealous, no intimacy and no social life.

But, everything must come to an end, and I have started to plan small wildlife expeditions with and without Terje – and am planning on a late night on town with my old friends.

Terje has been spamming this with his technical details about mounting sledges, ropes and tires and has contacted almost the entire Norwegian expedition community.  I’ll try to catch up on blogging and will try out the old-worn-out-tires-training-rig one of these days.