Wednesday, July 8, 2009

More of Royse

Our tour around the Royse area (where the Nosterud farm is situated) continued with a trip to the Hole Church (not 'hole' as in a empty space, but a Norwegian named pronounced something like hol-la), which was rebuilt after a fire in the 40s. I think that this was the church my grandparents were married in (though none of the cousins could answer that for sure). The rebuilt church has a very modern design painted on the ceiling, certainly not what we expected when we first walked in. The over all look of the sanctuary was simple and uncluttered (very different from all the other churches we have visited in Europe), only some decorative items from the original church building that were rescued from fire (the altar piece for example) were more fancy in appearance.

I also was invited to play the organ in this church. It was a nice relatively new instrument in great condition (though I am reminded that I am a pianist, not an organist - my attempt at pedal work was laughable). It is a tracker organ, meaning that all the workings are mechanical (versus having the keys trigger an electronic switch that opens the air flow to the various pipes). As a pianist I like tracker organs, simply because the more stops your have pulled (meaning the more pipes you have playing with each key you press) there is a bit more resistance to the fingers - thus it has a similarity to the piano in that regard. The family wanted Beth to sing something, so she sang one verse of I am So Glad Each Christmas Eve (the only song she knows in Norwegian) much to the delight of the relatives.

In the Hole Church graveyard we could not locate the grave of my great-grandmother (my grandpa Nosterud’s mother). It is in an unmarked grave and the church records were too vague to determine an exact location. However we did see the grave of my great-grandfather (and his last wife). This same grave site was also used for Truls and Per’s parents - it was common for the same gravesite to be used by multiple members of the same family. The cousins had purchased some flowering plants, and they spent some time that afternoon cleaning up the grave site a bit and planting the flowers. Over here we have seen many people in the graveyards watering the flowers around the graves of their family members - each cemetery has large watering cans just for this purpose. In some cases the family can pay for someone to care for the gravesite, but from what we could see many people took this responsibility on themselves.

After visiting the Hole Kirke we took a road up the side of a mountain by the lake, known as the Queen’s Road. There used to be a chair lift going up the side of the mountain years ago, it has been a favourite lookout site for many decades. The view from the top was awesome. At the top we also saw part of the King’s Road, and ancient road that went through this region. It was so steep that horses used to pull a tree behind them on the way down as a form of brakes. Hard to believe horses and carts used to go up and down that road - no nice switchbacks or tunnels to make the grade less steep!

The final lookout point we stopped at was a hang-gliding take-off point (though it looked like it hadn‘t been used very much recently). Apparently this was a great place to hang-glide, the up-drafts are strong and people can stay in the air for a long time. I tried to imagine running down the wooden ramp and jumping into thin air - even with a hang-glider it still seemed crazy.
At the bottom of the mountain we said goodbye to the cousins who came along for the trip (Kari, Anne-Berit, Sissel & Terje). Then Beth and I were taken back to Per’s house for some relaxing. We started on our catch-up work, mostly backing up and cataloguing pictures. Before supper we went for a little swim in the Tyrifjord, the lake is shallow for a long ways out right by the Nosterud farm, so we took the row boat out a few hundred meter and jumped in there, but even so it wasn’t very deep. The water was a nice temperature however.

The day concluded with another fantastic meal cooked by Per (a wonderful chef), and then we spent some time afterwards visiting. The idea was to get to bed earlier than recent days, but we weren’t all that successful. But when we did retire to bed the coolness of the room was nice after a long hot day. Sleep came easy!

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