Easter vacation - skiing around Oslo

The Easter is a big thing in Norway, in addition to the regular weekend there are 3 public holidays, and 3 more days with school vacation. For those taking out those three extra days of vacation plus the extra weekend, it means ten full days of vacation, enough for doing some holidays. We usually try to go for a longer skiing trip or a longer boat trip (typically to Bohuslän in Sweden) during this vacation.

This year it has been snowing really a lot in Oslo, and the forecast promised really fantastic weather, so it seemed clear to us that there was no point in travelling somewhere this year - we would just go skiing locally - though, it was still a question of weather we'd just use our home as a base and do day trips, or if we should try to make some trip with overnight stays. In the end our Easter ended up as one normal weekend, two days with me working from home, one day sledging in Korketrekkeren, one day of relaxation, a three days skiing trip around Oslo and one day of relaxation. Except, our 14 years old son denied joining any activities.

I think the best quality of Oslo is that the nature is so close - and that there is so much of it. I've shown quite some islands and sea in my earlier posts - but the amount of sea and islands is totally dwarfed by the amount of forest in the municipality. The geographical center of Oslo is actually in the middle of the forest north of the populated areas - and there is much more forest than city in the municipality.

We took the metro line Holmenkollbanen (the most popular line among tourists) up to the end stop, Frognerseteren, at the north-west side of Oslo, at 469 metres above the sea level - then we went quite far north - to Kikutstuen - and finally we had our car parked at a parking place at the east side of Oslo, Ammerud, nearby our home. We had two sleep-overs on our trip.

Our three days of skiing was actually quite hard - some 40 km, for a well-trained adult being alone and sticking to the better tracks and having equipment optimized for skiing in the tracks, it's a day trip. We encountered quite much difficult terrain and difficult skiing conditions. Distances are measured in kilometres - but they can be so different, at the worst we spent like one and a half hour doing one kilometer. Several times our 7yrs old complained loudly and said he would never go skiing again. It was terrible - had we really pushed him so hard that he had grown a permanent distaste to skiing? Apparently not - luckily he was in good mood and full of energy again in the nicer downhills. The last 7.5 kilometres from Sinober to the parking included 111 metres of uphill and 301 metres of downhill, all good tracks and none of the hills being too bad, I think we spent between one and two hours on it.

I think the trip was good for all of us, even though we adults felt quite so wrecked after the trip. We slept really a lot when coming home.

All photos available on IPFS QmahCZT2jzZZYftYj4ALCQ56Qt1A59y1aRznFt5ofvfaDE. License: CC BY-SA 4.0