A Little Detour
After only waiting for a short while at that gas station, the car that stopped for me (was it the first car that I saw that day?) was a dirty Toyota pick-up truck. The driver was going slowly after refuelling, and it looked like he was going to stop near me. I was getting ready to run away from trouble, because in my mind I was expecting the driver to be the sort of person you get when you see a dirty pick-up truck in small town in movies (all set in USA), a hick who doesn't appreciate foreigners and doesn't even a language other than his native tongue.
How different it turned out to be.
"You want to go to Trondheim?", he said in very good English.
He was only going for 30km on that road (well, not much, but it was actually close to 10% of the total distance I had to cover to get to Trondheim), but I decided to accept his offer anyway. The driver's name was Dan, and his passenger was his loyal dog, Yippee, so named because he looked sad when Dan found him.
Dan was a carpenter, building a summer cabin up in the mountains near there.
After the half an hour ride - the road having a speed limit of 60 - he was turning off. There was a small gas station, and I wondered if I should stand there, or on the road, because that gas station looked very abandoned. We drove to the gas station, and before letting me go, he told me what he was doing in the region, and said he could use a bit of help, "Would you like to help?"
I thought about it for a few seconds, and I said "Yeah, alright, why not.". Later on Dan would tell me he was very surprised when I said so. As for me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, and how much more adventure can you get if you don't accept strange detours?
So we drove a further few miles through the tiny road (with the woods to the left and right) through the damp morning. At 7 o'clock, I was inside a messy wooden trailer eating breakfast (an open-top-sandwich, proper Norwegian!), and half an hour later, I was standing on the roof-top of a half-finished cabin using a nail-gun to nail down a protective water-proofing layer.
Dan was making the cabin for his friend. It was on a great location too, on the hills with forest all around, and a view of a lake on a clear day.
At first it was difficult walking on the extremely slanted roof, but after awhile I got used to it - it reminded me of my childhood as I used to climb up to the roof of my home (we had a flat roof and a "pyramid" in the middle, so there were no dangers of falling).
After a good day's work, Dan asked me, "Hey, do you want to see a movie? Let's see what's on.". So we drove to Elverum to see the Transformers movie. It was a great afternoon, the rain had stopped and the sun had come out a bit. It was a Friday but strangely the city and cinema was quiet, there were only 6 of us in the cinema: a father and his boy, 2 teenage girls (who were bored of the film), and us. Maybe it wasn't late enough, or the city wasn't big enough. It did feel like a remote mountain town, something you'd get in the middle of the USA or something.
Transformers was quite lame, but we enjoyed it anyway, laughing about how dumb it was. There was one romance scene that felt so fake that we both had to laugh out loud, the 2 girls, who were sitting in front of us, turned around wondering we were laughing about.
After the movie, we went back to our trailer (ha!) and slept. I slept quite well after the manual labor.
The weather the next day was still cloudy, but a lot better. We finished the water-proof layer on the roof (Dan said later he'll put grass on it) and put walls on one side of the house. Other than that, I did not get a lot of travelling done ;) .
Dan decided to go out that night, because as he claims, he stays up for two days in a row and only then can he sleep. I met him after half of a two-day awake period and he slept the night before, so that day was another half of his stay-awake period, and he decided to spend it out on town with his friends from the region (he used to live in the area). But before that we took a drive to have a shower; it was a half-hour drive to a camping ground which had a real shower, with hot water. After that I managed to clean and organize the trailer a little bit.
The Sunday began as a very warm, sunny day, great for working, except for the fact that Dan wanted to sleep! He woke up later in the afternoon, but then it started to rain. We ended up just playing cards. I had a great weekend staying with Dan (and Yippee), wishing I had more time for my holiday so I can spend it building the cabin, but I decided I have to continue on to Trondheim the next day.
Later that evening Dan treated me to pizza at a restaurant, which for some reason to me also had a quiet American middle-of-nowhere mountain town flair to it.
The day began with another stop to have a shower (such luxury), and continued with quite a long drive. At first Dan took me to the place he originally was going to drop me off (Rena), and I hoped to be lucky. But he decided to drive further north to a gas station he knew about, which was a lot bigger. It turned out to be quite a long drive, but Dan said he was glad to take me. I was quite grateful for that, and I thought about the great weekend that I just had, making a new friend.
After that quite a long drive, looking for a gas station with a giant chicken as a symbol, we found it and Dan dropped me off. He went in to get a hotdog, and I started hitching again, asking a father-daughter couple who weren't friendly at all - well the daughter was friendly, then the dad showed up, shaking his head, pfft.
A few minutes later a pickup truck reacted to my thumb and slowed down. It was Dan again! I hadn't noticed from the shape of his car. He was just leaving after the hotdog. I had to laugh when I realized it was him.
"Hey, are you going to Trondheim?" I asked him jokingly. We wished each other luck and parted ways again.