I had just come back from Oslo on Friday after 5 days in Oslo where I had to examine my students and of course attended our Christmas party... Which as usual led to the fact that I was flying with the worse hangover ever, and the Christmas chaos in Gardermoen due to freezing fog with 2 hours of check-in queue did not exactly help..
But I had finally gotten my rifle permit and picked up my Ruger MK 77, a 30.06 caliber polar bear protection rifle :D So now I don’t have to miss my dear .22 cal rifle as much as before…
Oki had to check out our new piece of equipment...
Saturday afternoon we had finally managed to pack everything on 6 scooters and 5 sledges and were ready to leave Longyear.
My "loaded" scooter
The ca. 30 km to the hut took us 4 (!!) hours instead of about 45min... it had snowed so much that we got stuck and had to dig out every scooter and sledge at least once at the steep hill up the glacier.
After we arrived and had moved all our stuff into the hut our holiday began... From then on Christmas was all about great food, relaxing and having a really good time with nice people ;-)
Oki passed out in front of the fireplace after a long, cold trip
The kitchen
We even had a Christmas tree with us :D
Harvey and Marzena brought a delicious Christmas cake
Karoline, Marzena and Harvey reading
Thue was playing guitar for us
The cook
On Sunday evening after we had been on a nice ca. 10 km skiing trip in Reindalen the sky suddenly cleared up for about an hour or so and we went out to get “tanned” :-D
view of Reindalen
Our hut
Two weird guys on scooters drove by the hut without stopping, and came back about an hour later. They did not have a clue about where they were, what hut we were staying at or which way to go, neither did they have any equipment besides a small backpack and a rifle… An hour after we sent them off to Svea a snowstorm suddenly came in. It lasted for the next three days, and was so bad that going out for anything but a quick trip to the toilet was just not possible.
So for the next three days we enjoyed tremendous amounts of food and were lazy :D
Monday - Christmas eve!
Oki did for some reason not really enjoy playing Santa - or one of his reindeer...
The presents
Oki got a cute food bowl from Karoline, Rico, Nuna and Silver :D
But hey - Christmas can be hard work... At least if it is you first one and unwrapping is still sooo exciting :-)
Since there was not much to do during the storm we were planning new trips ;-)
Thue was reading a book about Mt Everest expeditions (Into Thin Air)
Whereas Rico seemed to have developed a slightly different taste of literature
On Wednesday - the day we wanted to go back to Longyear - the storm had stopped and some scooters and sledges needed to be digged out...
Despite of incredible amounts of snow we managed to drive home to Longyear even if it twice looked as if we might have to go back to the hut.
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