Last summer we “invited” our devotional readers to the White Mountains of Franconia, New Hampshire when we visited Elisabeth’s beloved Gale Cottage for many weeks. This summer, we are featuring summer travel to another formative destination for not only Elisabeth, but especially Lars. We are delighted to share Elisabeth and Lars’ beautifully descriptive Norwegian Travel Journal from 1993 for a number of weeks, including Lars’ endearing account of childhood memories in Norway. This week we begin with Part One of their Norwegian Journal. . .
My husband Lars Gren (yes, I’m Mrs. Lars Gren-EE is only my pen name) grew up in Norway, but he had never seen the North Cape. Last May we saw it. Seven days on a bus from Oslo took a delightful group of Norwegians, the Voases from Mississippi, Lars and me up to the top of that elongated rock pile which is Norway, through Mojsa, beautiful farm country with lovely old houses kept in perfect repair, very green pastures with sheep and newborn lambs, along the River Glomma. Everything neat, trim, ordered, peaceful, somehow speaking of strength and stability.
Then deep ravines, rushing streams, high, barren, rock-topped and rounded mountains with patches of old snow, coverings of new snow. As we go north, barns are larger to house the animals with all their feed year round. Fir forests give way to stunted evergreens, then to birches with sun shining through their delicate new leaves. Suddenly, right close to the road, two reindeer, so much smaller than I had imagined, with velvet antlers. This, we are told, is the country of the Lapps, who are properly called Sarni. They own the reindeer and follow their annual migrations to Finland and Sweden.
At the Arctic Circle on Day Three great sloping fields of snow, ten feet deep, black rocks, more mountains, lowering clouds and blue sky. Half-an-hour’s drive takes us down to green forests, a rushing river, and a graveyard where several thousand Russian and Yugoslavian prisoners of World War II are buried-a lonely, quiet place. Sunshine. Birdsong.
Fjord after fjord, surrounded by spectacularly steep mountains. Seventeen tunnels, one 4 1/2 kilometers long. Cheerful little brooks tumble down toward the road, spindly birches grow not more than eight or ten feet tall. We see the midnight sun, red and low on the horizon at Tysfjorden. Strange to have no darkness in twenty-four hours-but there are four months of the year there where there is little but darkness. A magnificent moose strides speedily along in the snow, unperturbed by the bus stopping.
**Excerpt originally from The Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter November/December 1993