Day 9

Stuck in the red tape

If Dylan was writing the blog the whole entry for today would read, “It was a good day. I liked today”. Thankfully for our vast readership, Dylan is not writing this particular blog entry and so, luckily (or painstakingly) for you this blog entry will at the very least begin.

Tim and Dylan woke up to find that Roark was nowhere to be seen. This was surprising as he is almost always the last one to wake up. But after wondering around the vast downstairs area of the club house he didn’t seem to be around. It turns out he found a puffy yoga mat in the gym to lie on in an attempt to hide from any possible contact with bed bugs (which may or may not exist). Needless to say, he was still asleep.

After brekkie, we started the transfer to a smaller cottage next door (barely 10 metres away), which will be our home for the next three nights. It’s as nice as anyone could hope for but it’s always tough transferring from the world’s best club house/mansion which we’ve had all to ourselves over the past week.

It was then off to Oslo where the Norsk O festival will be taking place over the next 3 days. Today’s event was the sprint and all of us were a little under-prepared having not even looked at a sprint map for quite some time.

Dylan had a fairly clean race, but found that his running speed was a bit lacking, Tim had the opposite problem- trying to run too fast for his navigation and mis-reading the map, making lots of errors including first heading towards 9 instead of 8 (15secs), going to the wrong side of one of the artificial fences (30 secs) and 4 or 5 other small mistakes and bad route choices. Roark didn’t have any big mistakes, but had a fair number of small mistakes which added up in the end. The terrain wasn’t to complex (although we still managed to make some mistakes), so the organisers decided to put out taped barriers to make the route choices more interesting and to allow a reasonably open area to be put to good use.

After the race we each grabbed a massive burger at the arena. We hadn’t been clever enough to pack any food. We then headed back to Einarbu.

Back at the club house, Tim and Roark decided to take their new shoes for a spin (they had arrived that morning). They had each been given a pair of x-talon 212’s and o-roc 280’s. They each tried out the shoe they were least familiar with so Tim gave the x-talons a go around while Roark tried out o-roc’s for the first time. They took a run down to the dam and put them through their fair share of interesting terrain from muddy marshes to rocky ridges. More to come later about these awesome shoes...

Once the shoe spinning was complete, Dylan and Roark decided they were still hungry so they headed off to the kitchen to fry up some hamburgers. With hamburgers in hand they headed back to our new cottage. 

 Tim and Roark settled down into some Arrow (a tv series), while Dylan read his book nearby (this particular series put an end to our blog for quite a while, as you may have noticed). We then headed off to bed.

Awkward interaction of the day: Asking Niall McCarthy if he remembers Salome (Salami).

Quote of the day: Salami’s such a cougar – Tim Chambers

Fact of the day: We were invited to the party, unfortunately it’s not a 21^st (not even close).