Day 6

A change of scenery (some slightly different trees)

After going to bed rather late last night, all of us needed to catch some zzzzz's, so our planned 8am wake up was delayed by a couple of hours.

We got up, changed into our SA kit and plunged straight into our second successive interview (this time a newspaper interview- so Roark would fortunately be able to think before he spoke...)

The interview seemed to go reasonably well and South African tourism was left intact (no calls from the South African embassy today)

After the interview we got a ride with Anders to go do some middle distance training in a forest just to the south of Eina-bru. Dylan tried to focus on using contours as much as possible, while Roark had a wonderful time exploring the root systems of the local trees (see yesterday's video). Tim enjoyed the orienteering part of it, but not so much the swarm of bugs that followed him around the second half of the course.

On arriving back at the club house, Tim and Roark caught a few more zzz's while Dylan continued his literary adventures under the Moose head.

Sigmund then arrived to pick us up and after a mad scramble of bag packing (Roark only woke up as Sigmund arrived, but still managed to get ready before Dylan), we were on our way to Halden. On our way we experienced another example of the temperamental Norwegian weather (sunny, rainy, sunny, rainy )

We arrived at Halden SK (a club with a reputation almost as big as Roark's imaginary snakes), and were warmly greeted by one of the club members (A WOC medallist in '97) who showed us around and gave us our training maps for our stay here.

The discovery of wifi was then made and after half an hour of the incessant clickety-clack of keyboards, Tim and Roark headed out for a short course around the hilltop that the club is situated on ( Dylan remained behind to further utilise the wifi with a skype call home). The terrain was really nice, with the majority of the forest being a lot more open than what we have previously encountered. Roark managed to get into the map very quickly and enjoyed the mapping style and accuracy.

The showers were then found and to our suprise had only one button (the temperature was fixed and the length of the shower fixed at a rather short 30secs) (Halden has a water shortage problem, though we cant quite understand how with the amount of water we, our clothes and our shoes have seen on this trip so far.

We then climbed up the viewing tower to take some pics of the amazing views (trees trees and more trees in every direction you look) (Wall-E says hello)

By this stage (11pm) we were all rather ravenous, so we got our cook on and rustled up some spaghetti and mince.

After dinner we made an attempt at video editing and put together our 1st (of hopefully many) videos of our trip.

Quote of the day: "Can I borrow your toilet" (though if we tried to speak Norwegian, it would turn out a lot worse)