Already March! Halfway through the semester! This month I also went on two trips: a winter trip and a trip during the easter break to Bergen and Stavanger. For both of the trips I’m going to make a seperate blog post.
The weeks before the trips we had, like always, an alternation of theoretical and practical lessons. In the theoretical lessons we learned about children and nature, grouproles, public health and so on. We also had a discussion about how you see yourself as a veiledner (leader) and made presentations about the Holmenkollen ski festival. Normally we would go there, but because of covid the festival is canceled.
In the practical lessons we did a lot of fun stuff. What was also really nice is that we switched the groups more up again, instead of staying in the same groups over and over again. For the theorical lesson about children and nature we also went outside to go back to our childhood and play with everything nature gives us. We also learned about bush craft. We build shelters with a tarp and without, so only with twigs and everything the nature could give us. This resulted in a lot of cool results and decent shelters!
We had an other lesson about map and compass, but then
given by classmates, who know a lot about this topic. The lesson was a full daytrip, where we all learned to guide the group with our map and compass and how to locate ourself. The last thing we did was rock climbing. We learned first all the safety stuff and after that we just had fun climbing and belaying each other.
The weekends were again filled with nice hikes (for example to the Inverted Boat), fun birthday parties, playing and sitting outside, game nights and knitting (the new class hype)!
Weather update: A mix between rain and spring weather. Nice for the climbing but not so nice for the cross country skiing.
COVID-19 update: ‘lockdown’! The numbers are rising so some places closed down again and a mouth mask is again obligated in public places.
We all left together at the university with a bus and drove to Hovden, a three hour drive north. We stayed in a cabin in Bjaen, a little more north then Hovden. It was the first time after the other ski trip that I was back on my skis. We did a short trip around in the surroundings, with a new group and as instructor again Tim.
our skis. That’s a lot! This time we switched instructors, so it was the first time that I was in a group with Len as instructor during cross country skiing. He was really different as instructor, what was also nice to experience. Tim would really take a role as leader and focused on the skiing. Len focused more on the whole experience, so also everything aournd skiing and let us do more by ourselves. I was still not the best in skiing, but already better then first and I found it also more fun. You also noticed it in the group. 
People focused less on themselves and just surviving and more on the others and the social aspect. We also focused that day on map and compass and we even talked about avalanches and made in half an hour a surviving snowhole for one person. I didn’t think that you could make something so fast in the snow, but after 30 minutes it was there. It was not comfortable, but good enough to survive a bad storm. We also tried to find a person under the snow with our avalanche probes. Don’t worry we just digged a
hole in the snow, where a person could lay in and the others could just stand above. There I realised that it is really a challenge to find people in the snow and that you also had to be lucky. The first time I pocked was a couple centimers of the person laying there. I could have just missed him as this was a real situation. That’s crazy to think about! We also saw this day some wild reindeers!!
the other part of the group just started digging straight down where our sleeping area was going to be. When the sleeping area hole was deep enough they also started digging to the entrance so that these two things got connected with each other. After that we had to make the roof. There were two possibilities for this. One was like an iglo, where you just saw blocks out of the snow and put them on top of each other. The other way was that 6 people were standing in the deep hole with a tarp over them and that all the others threw gently snow on them. All the snow would settle, because of the throwing, the compressing and the heat the bodies in the middle would give off. I did with 5 other girls the second option! It was a really cool experience. You felt the weight of the snow on you, but not that it was heavy. We also felt it settle after some time, so we could get out through the entrance tunnel one by one. After that was done the
biggest work came, making the sleeping area big enough for six people. That was a lot of digging, sawing, throwing the snow out… . We worked a whole day on our snowhole, but then it was finally ready! It was just big enough for all of us, so quit cozy but it would work! For the night we also had to do some stuff for safety, like marking our entrance clearly, have shovels ready inside and outside the snowhole and texts our instructors before we went to sleep and when we woke up. It was a cozy night, with not a lot of space in a selfmade snowhole.
We all packed our stuff again and left the snowholes. We went down to an area with a mountain. We climbed this mountain by going zigzag all the way up (luckily without our
rucksacks). Almost at the top our instructor told us where at the mountain could be avalanche risk and just at that moment we heard the snow under our skis settle. We all faded a little. Our instructor told us fast that we didn’t have any avalanche risk, where we were standing (what we 
obviously already kwew but still). The mountain was not steep enough. After that we went up a little more and enjoyed the view that we got on top (and the wind). After that we went down and back to our cabin to dry our stuff that was wet and to make us ready for another night outside. This night we went even closer to the
cabin, at a place where was snow but also trees and other vegetation growing. We made in groups of three emergency shelters with our tarp, the snow and everything else we could use.
The week went by so fast! In the morning we went back to our cabin, cleaned everythign up and then already went back home with the bus.
We had a lot of sun and almost no rain/snow. The bad thing about that was that it was way to warm (above zero degrees almost all the time). That made that the snow conditions were really bad, so we had to use different wax then normally. We had to use ‘klister’. This wax is really sticky. The good thing about is that you can get up hills, but the bad thing about it is that you slow down when you are going down and that snow sticks on your skis. Not fun, but bettet then no wax.
The sun raised and so did we. Time to explore Tromso! First we walked through the city and saw some nice buildings, churches and views over the river and with all the mountains. We visited the library, which also had a beautiful view, the famous church and some giftshops, like a typical Tromso giftshop but also a shop where they had all kinds of comics and lego stuff. Really cool!
to see Tromso up there at night with all the lights. Suddenly a man came in the café and said the northern lights were visible. We ran as fast as possible with all our stuff outside. It was phenomenal to see the northern lights in real life! Unfortunately I couldn’t make some good photos with my camera from the northern lights, because of bad settings. Luckily Luca could take amazing photos with her phone! Even better photos then all of us could take with our professional camera. We stayed up there for some time to enjoy the northern lights and when it was a
little bit less clear we went back down with the cablecar. We went back to the hostel to eat something and warm up again. At 11 o’ clock we decided to go back out for the northern lights. This time we went to a lake close to our hostel, what was recommended to us as also a really good place to see the northern lights. We were lucky, still a clear sky! Already when we walked there we saw the northern lights again. At the lake we just laid down and looked at the northern lights dancing and even changing color, green to purple. What a crazy day! We all went to bed exhausted but so grateful.
We got our car today and drove away from Tromso. First
we made a stop at a small husky farm. Unfortunately the weather was too bad, really windy, to go husky sledding. We still had a nice time there cuddling the huskies and getting some more information about the huskies and the 
sledding. After that we drove to Senja, an island in the direction of the Lofoten, where we rented an Airbnb. I sat in the car with Luca and Maike, switching as drivers. I took the job as DJ on me.
Time to explore Senja! First we visited a small troll village. After that we started driving to some nice viewpoints in the mountains. During the drive to the second viewpoint the weather became bad. There was a lot of wind and snow blowing around. Our sight became bad, we didn’t even see the next white/red pole at the side of the road. We decided to go slowly further and hoped that it would get better after some turns in the road, but it didn’t. We arrived
at the second viewpoint, but we knew it was too dangerous to get out of the car to enjoy the view. Luca went for a short time out to help Maike turn around the car. She already had to set some steps in direction of the cliff, because of the wind. The other just saw Luca going in and out the car and thought it was safe. So two of them went out. Luca went back out to tell them it was obviously not safe. They all crawled back to the car and Elena lost her beanie. We decided we couldn’t go further on this road and turned back to go to the 
national park of Senja. There we did a nice hike in the snow! After that we started driving to Harstad. Normally we would arrive around 9 o’ clock but then we had to stop on the way for a barrier and we didn’t know why. After some waiting and searching why we had to wait we figured out that the GPS changed to the wrong route, namely the route where we had to take a ferry, what was really expensive to do with both cars and all of us in. We decided then to turn around and drive a whole way back to get back on the right road. We came around 11 o’ clock at our destination, the DNT cabin in Harstad. It was cool to see and sleep in a DNT cabin. We putted on the heaters and got some snow to melt, because we didn’t have any running water in the cabin (and the toilet was also just a hole in the ground outside). We were glad that we had the heaters, so we could go quick to bed, because it was such a long drive.
days. It was above zero degrees the whole time and it was also raining sometimes. This made that the snow was in a bad condition and that there was a lot of avalanche risk, so we had to watch out for potential avalanche terrain. We looked again at the route we wanted to take and saw some potential avalanche terrain. Luca talked with the guy where we rented the cabin from (a typical red cabin! Lovely!) and he referred us to a local woman, who knows all about the surroundings. His opinion was that some parts of our trip, where a risk, but not all. After that we prepared the rest for our trip, like our food and our rucksacks and discussed more about our route. We decided to wait what the local woman would say and then look again at our plans.
other hikes, that were more suitable at this moment. We went back to our red cabin and looked again at our plan. We decided to mix the new recommended hikes with the parts of our original plan, that were still possible. After lunch we drove to our start point. We were going to do a hike to a beach about 2 kilometers away. First we tried to go up some hills to see what our possible hike for tomorrow would be like, but after a short time we decided to go
immediately to the destination of the day, the beach, because the deep snow was really hard to hike in and it was already getting late. The hike to the beach was hard. The path was not visible anymore, because all of the snow. So we had to find our own path, what was really hard in the deep snow. Most of the times we sank until our knees in the snow. There was also a very steep part at the end of the hike, what was a bit scary, because the hill ended in a cliff. We did 2 hours over the 2 kilometers, so that’s crazy. Once on the beach we were glad that we made it and looked for a good spot to set our tents up. We looked at the wind direction and if it was going to change during the night and set our tents up in the best possible place taking all that into account. After we just 
put our tents up it started to rain, lucky! We all got in our tents and talked and made dinner. I was in a tent with Wil(lemijn) and Elena. It kept raining and we had to go once out, because the rain was coming in our tent, because the tarp was too much laying outside the tent so the rain could slide in. That really sucked, because my backpack was laying in the puddle that was created by that and some things were already a bit wet, because of the rain we had during our hike to the beach. We went to sleep and didn’t had a good night sleep because the weather was getting worse and worse. It started stroming, raining harder, the wind turned the wrong direction and was now blowing really hard on our tents. In the night we had to go out to tighten the ropes of the tents more, but it didn’t make any difference. More things were getting wet, because the tent was moving so hard because of the wind and all the cords were loose.
didn’t know what was best to do. In the afternoon the storm would be getting worse, but the hike with this storm was also dangerous, especially the steep part. We decided we had to leave the beach, because our tents wouldn’t hold the rest of the storm. From the other tent one pole already broke! We packed our stuff and left. From our tent two poles were also bended. We were very lucky on our way back, just when we started our hike back in the rain the wind laid down a bit. We crossed the steep part, without problem. The rest of the hike was also going a lot faster, because we know had an idea of the path we had to take and there was already less snow, because of all the rain fall. 
After one hour we finally arrived at our car, all soaking wet. We drove to a café to warm up and decided we couldn’t go through with our trip. The main reason for that was that one tent broke down, but that everything was wet and everyone was demotivated, because the storm was still going. These things also played part in the decision.
Time to visit some more places in the Lofoten
. First we drove to Reine. Reine is famous for the yellow houses and the nice views. After that we went to flakstad beach, what was pretty cool. At one side you saw the ocean and the beach (and some surfers) and at the other side you
saw the mountains. What we also saw a lot driving around
in the Lofoten was fish (stockfish) hanging on wooden racks to dry, like a lot of fish. After chilling on the beach we went to our cabin in Leknes.
Time for another day visiting more places in the Lofoten. First stop: Nusfjord. Nusfjord was for me one of the most beautiful places in whole the Lofoten. It was a little fishing village, close to a
beautiful fjord. We hiked some time there on the hills to get a nice view. It was so beautiful and lovely! Second stop, back at Leknes. We went to a little souvenir shop and bought some wine to have a nice cozy evening. Third stop: Henningsvaer. A little city famous for the 
football field and the harbor. The football field was a little bit disappointing, because there are a lot of very cool pictures you can find of it on the internet, but in real life it stays an ordinary football field. The harbor was more what I was expecting. It was really nice, because of all the colored boats and houses. I also took this cool
picture with the rainbow from the harbor! Last stop for the day Svolvaer. Svolvaer is like Leknes a bigger city in the Lofoten, so we just drove through it 
to see some nice things, but it is mostly just a city. The other little cities and villages are a lot more nice to visit and explore. After driving around in Svolvaer we went to our cabin, also in Svolvaer and had a nice and cozy game night with wine and good food.
after that to our cabin, close to Narvik. In the evening we called again with the husky farm guy to see if it was still possible to go husky sledging. We had a bad feeling about this, because the last days it was really warm and it rained a lot and he confirmed this feeling, sadly enough. So no husky sledging for us on this trip.
Because we don’t go husky sleding today we looked for some alternatives to do. We found a ice dome, which we visited. It was really cool to hear how they made the ice dome and also really cool to see the different rooms, where you could sleep in. There were also a lot of ice sculptures with a lot of detail, what was really cool to see. After that we drove to
Tromso, where I went swimming with Elena, Luca and Wil and Maike and Sara visited a museum. On the way to Tromso, we also saw some tame reindeers. Unfortunately we couldn’t get close, because they were on someone’s private domain. 
The swimming pool was a nice end of the trip. We relaxed a lot in the outdoor pool and the hottub. After that we went to our Airbnb in Tromso. We thought about going out again for the northern lights, but there were a lot of clouds. This time I realized again how lucky we are that we saw it so long and so clear in the begging.
Crazy that we already fly back to Kristiansand. The days went so fast and were so exciting. Also so exhausting, that I could even sleep on one of our flights. We safely landed, went back to our housing and early to bed, because tomorrow we had again class.