Paul Rosenquist

Louise and I spent 10 days in Stryn, Norway. A place made for burning calories.
900km’s over small winding roads (highways in Norway) brought us to a place that I would say should look like heaven. 1800mtr hight granite walls, green valleys, white glaciers, and best of all, mirror flat turqouise lakes and fjords…

In the background our rowing water….

We crashed on a camping just outside of Stryn. Strynsvattn is a 15km long lake surrounded by massive mountains and 95% of the time mirror flat. Even better is, that there are no other boats on it. We could only wonder why…..At one time I was rowing….after 25minutes i was tired and looked behind me…Jaaaiks..All I could see was a weird mix of mountains and blue skies…the endless stretch of water was so mirror flat that it felt I was flying. My boat slicing through it, hardly making a riple, no sound, at least 2km to land on one side and perhaps 3 on the other…I did not dare to let the boat come to a complete stop as it felt it would plummit to the bottom. Suddenly I see three rolling waves pulling through the water about 50 mtrs from me. Surging forward, sometimes rolling with a small white crest on them..WHERE did this come from? I stared at it for a while and noticed that they just kept going…Is this the reason there are no other boats out here?…. Is this the Troll version of Nessi? I grabbed my oars and continued for an other 20minutes…

From our camping we could handpick mountain peaks that we wanted to climb and there were some really nice mountain passes to bike over. Folks hanging around at our camping were more or less wondering what on earth we were doing. I guess they thought Louise and I had a large family as we really spread ourselves out on the camping… We had two tents…one for hanging around in and one for sleeping, our rowing boats, bikes, an inflatable sofa, our washing line with smelly gear, and our BBQ …Walking up and down with pans full of Pasta amoungst the card playing retired folks from Holland and Germany you could see them thinking ‘how many people are they feeding in those tents’. Droppin in after a long bike ride late in the eavening, taking a plunge in the freezing waters and than quicklu igniting the BBQ were the routines for me.
Great to spend a lot of time together and train together. As we have climbes so many big mountains before Louise and I were a bit, sort of, laid back about these ’small’ 1800mtr peaks. So one morning after a 20km row, we decided to go for the highest one in the area. Skåla 1850mtrs. In shorts, and a backpack filled with water and a jacket, we headed of. It said 5hours up and 3 down on the map, so in the Alps we usually divide that by 2 for us. Nearly 3 hour and 40 minutes later we both stood on the top…wasted…the 2200mtrs of climbing felt harder as ever since I guess we both dont run so much anymore and maybe rowing before doing this was not so smart either…walkin in shorts in a horizontal snowstorm for an hour was not so good either…We jammed ourselves into the top hut and made ourselves a quick dinner…I mentioned for the Dutch hikers there that I guess the Norwegians are tougher than the Alp people..as their time indications for the hikes/climbs are more accurate…They aggreed, and said they usually had to add 2 hours. At 19:30 we decided we better get down again. We felt it was getting late but as it does not get dark we were not stressed, It would be nice to make it to the shops before 22 as we wanted a good steak on the BBQ that eavening. So we sort of ran down the trail when it was ok and we raced down the glaciar…not thinking that this would make us pay double in muscle pain the day after. We could hardly walk for 3 days… I could not eaven sit down on a toilet..just sort of stand in fron of it,..and crash down on to it. However the next day we somehow could not resist the good weather and we walked up an other peak. Up was ok, but when we finally reached the little summit, we had no iddea how to get down again.
Good fun. Nice to not be in the boat so much fo a while. Eaven though the mirror flat waters just next to our tent constantly gave us a bad concious..row more…

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Camp ‘Paul & Louise’