I had Fred Eaglsmith tickets for last weekend. I love Fred Eaglesmith shows. I've been stalking him for over 12 years, after all. I have *every single album*. Even the old ones from the 80s. Even the Paradise Motel one. So, you should know, it's gotta be something pretty good, in terms of competing offers, for me to not go to a Fred show, and one that I already have tickets to, at that.
Enter something really good: I was working in Oslo for a week, and I could easily have flown with just carry-on bags, and, on Friday, when we were done with the working thing, gotten into the airport express train to Gardermoen and been on a plane before nightfall. But! My Oslo contact - one of the world's coolest people, in my books - emailed before I picked my flight, and casually said something along the lines of, if you can stay for the weekend, bring your skis, we'll go to a log cabin in the mountains.
Let that run through your head for a second, will you? You're sitting at your desk, you've done a lot of bitching about the rain and freezing rain crap outside your window, you've not had a chance to use your skis because winter has been sucky non-winter this year. And then your computer beeps and tells you that you can go to a log cabin! in mountains! to nordic ski, in Norway! with cool people!
Yeah, you would have let concert tickets go too.
So. We worked hard all week, we made a lot of progress. By Friday morning, though, we were on the unfocused side. My eyes kept going to my ski bag, casually propped into the corner of the meeting room. By early afternoon, there were three adults, two big dogs, our packs, our ski boots, and a big bowl of lamb stew crammed into a Volvo (the skis were on the roof rack), and we were off. Excitement.
The cabin is just that - a log cabin. None of this fancy cottage stuff where your "cottage" has 5 bedrooms and four baths and satellite television and all that. This was the real thing: a log cabin, with its own log cabin outhouse 
(complete with pictures of the Norwegian royal family for your viewing pleasure while using the facilities). It also had a wood stove, a propane heater though we ran out of gas on that one), a sink with a bucket under it to drain the water, a propane cook stove, kerosene lanterns and candles, and some battery powered lights, with the battery recharged by a little solar panel during the day. Lucky for us, the private roads were plowed - but there was no guarantee of that, and we'd come prepared to ski in. We got there at sunset. 
We stomped through the snow. G. made a fire, K. started shovelling off the deck. Me, I chilled the champagne (a pretty easy task when it's -15 both inside and out!) and then, when the wood stove got going, I started melting snow for water. As the only non-Norwegian, I got coddled a bit: I got the spot with the propane heater blasting at my back, I was offered blankets, my down duvet was brought into the warmest part of the cabin to pre-heat. So much for retiring the tiara...
The cabin - which is near the town of Fagernes, on the same ridge as the Fagernes airport - sits on a chain of pretty little lakes. All around are groomed ski trails - miles and miles and miles of them. And on Saturday morning, I had a look at the thermometer and when I saw the -20 after the sun had already come up, I realized that my blue wax wasn't going to be good enough and borrowed some green. And then I set out on my own. I am not a particularly great x-country skiier, and Norwegians I think are by definition, and when you're with two of them who met at a 35 km ski *race* or some similar nonsense, it only makes sense to ask which trail is the easiest and do that one on your own. At a sedate pace.
Ah but it was lovely! So lovely that, when I looked at the trail map at the second junction I came to, I decided I would do a bigger loop! And by that decision, I unconsciously abandoned my "easy" trail. At first it was fun, it went down and down. And then, I got to a spot where it was too steep for comfort - and I couldn't see around the next corner, it appeared to drop off the side of a cliff or something. I didn't want to hurtle off the side of a cliff (or something). I didn't want to break my leg at -20 skiing alone! I am a chicken! So I did what any reasonable chicken would do: I used the sit on bum method of slowing down. Which was effective (though when I later confessed this maneuvre to K., he said that I should be thrown into jail for messing up the tracks and was only appeased when I explained that this section of trail was too steep to have tracks on either side, and my bum did not leave an indent on the packed surface.)
So. After my skiing style included slowing down using my bum, the trail crossed a road - and seemed to keep descending further into the abyss! I was having no more of this, and I pulled out my digicam, 
and I called up the trail map photo I'd taken earlier and zoomed in, and concluded that the road I was crossing effectively cut off the death-defying-abyss part of the loop. Ha! I would foil them all! I would walk on the road until the trail reconnected! Which I did, for a while, but the road was so nicely snow covered, I decided I might as well ski on the road. That worked fine for a while - but when I finally got back to the trail, and I had a fair bit of uphill left, I realized that the road skiing had worn off all the green grip-wax (and remember, I don't own any green, so had none in my pocket). Oops. Oh well, a bit of an inner thigh and upper body workout, that.
That afternoon, despite a thermometer at -12 and colder, we sat in the sun on the deck, eating lunch and generally basking. It takes Norwegians to act like basking in the sun at temperatures like that is normal. I think I really like Norwegians.
Before heading out on Skiing Day 2, I spent some serious time with the topo map (and my digicam, which showed where the trails ran - there was no trail map at the cabin). I identified a 13 km loop around the chain of lakes, and then I asked G. for advice. She asked if I preferred a short time of strenuous uphill and a long glorious glide down, or a tedious slog over a long incline followed by another bum-sitting jump off an abyss (ok ok those were not her words, but my interpretation, and you *know* which direction I picked).
And that ski that day, at -15, was the best ski of my life. Glorious. The day before, there was a fresh bit of 
powder - and that combined with the low temperatures meant that there was no freebie glide (I even wondered if I'd managed to wax outside my grip zone for a bit, and it wasn't until G. confirmed that it was the temperature that I gave up on that suspicion). Now, though, the tracks had been skiied, and were so much faster the next morning. Not only that, but K. had watched me start to wax my skis for about five seconds before taking them away and giving me a gruff "you will need more than that" and then expertly waxing them for me, so I *knew* my waxing was *perfect* that day (seeing as it wasn't *my* waxing!).
It was brightly sunny and dreadfully cold, but cold is not a problem when skiing. About 5 km into the ski, I came to the long slog uphill, but I didn't mind at all. And then, for the last hour, I had that wonderful (wonderful!) glide along a high ridge, slowly descending until the last steep bit before crossing the road back to the cabin - and I didn't wipe out, either accidentally or on purpose!
I want to go back. It was wonderful. Really wonderful. I didn't once think about Fred Eaglesmith.