In July 2007, when Genie and I visited friends in Norway, we spent our first week in a cottage at Skjeggeby, near Sarpsborg. It rained every day. Or rather, it poured.
We contented ourselves with reading and visits to the local supermarket. During the short sunny periods we explored the local area, which is very green and heavily wooded. There's also a mass of water that I took to be a fjord and immediately fell in love with. I spent hours filming clouds reflected in water, trees reflected in water, rain splashing on water, that kind of thing.
Genie fancied a boat trip and we decided we'd try to hire a motorboat from our landlord, who ran the local activity centre. The weather seemed to have settled into a pattern, and we reckoned on sunshine, or at least no heavy rain, for at least a few hours each day.
No it's not a fjord, we were told, it's the River Glomma, also known as Glåma in some parts – the longest, biggest, baddest river in the whole of Norway. How much experience did we have with motorboats on dangerous rivers, anyway? Not a lot, admittedly, but we succeeded in hiring the motorboat after long instruction, promising to take all necessary precautions. We'd wear the lifebelts, we'd follow the excellent maps which showed clearly where not to go, and we'd bring the boat back safely.
We were true to our word but that's not to say that the trip up the Glomma wasn't without incident. When the rain did start it was light and gave us sufficient time to turn back before it really started. The scary moment came because I was so involved in filming the trip that I asked Genie to slow the boat right down and the engine stalled. We were alongside an island and the gap between it and the mainland was, by Glomma's standards, rather narrow. With rocks on one side, bigger rocks on the other, and a powerful current after all the recent rain, we started to go backwards.
The funny thing is that in those first few moments I didn't think of my own safety, nor that of my beloved wife. What scared me most was the thought that if we scratched this boat we'd really be in trouble!
Needless to say we survived. Genie managed to spark up the engine after I'd tried and failed, and the oars came in really handy against the rocks (sorry about those oars). Here's the movie I made of our wee adventure.
