Friday Fun

Friday afternoon we packed the kids into the car and headed north. The DVD player was at the ready, but the boys only managed one episode of SpongeBob before B boy had had enough and asked to have it turned off. Worried that he might be getting car sick again, I climbed into the back of the car (no easy feat in a small Golf!) and squeezed in between the boys. Benjamin put his head on my shoulder and promptly fell asleep.

The trip to the cottage can take anywhere from 2 hours and 45 minutes to 3 and a half hours. On these single lane roads, a lot depends on sheer luck. Getting stuck behind a trailer or, worse, a farm vehicle, can easily add 30 minutes to your journey. Not a big deal, but with Benjamin's motion sickness, the less time in the car, the better.

Fortunately for us, the drive up was amazingly smooth. No traffic to speak of, and with both boys in a state of dozing-to-snoring, it was peaceful, too. The trip is just long enough to feel that you are really getting away from it all, and the views passing by outside the window never fail to entertain. The landscape changes gradually from rolling green hills to more mountainous terrain, from lush fields with grazing animals to rugged and rocky peaks which only the most agile mountain goat can climb. This time around, the fall colours added beautiful splashes of orange, red and brown to the vistas surrounding us.

Arriving in another car just 10 minutes later were my parents and the boys' cousins. The boys love spending time with their cousins, and were excited at the prospect of a whole weekend together.

The weather was markedly cooler in the mountains, so we dug out our fall clothes and made our way across the marsh to the fire pit we built a few years ago when the boys were much younger. This is Standard Operating Procedure at the cottage. The fire pit is not a long walk walk from our cottage, and if the kids had their way, we would have all our meals there. They love it, because they get to help light the fire, look for sticks to use to grill whatever food we may have at the ready, and generally play around jumping from rock to rock.



Nightfall comes quickly in Norway these days, and Friday was no exception. From our altitude, however, it was a spectacular sunset, as we watched the sun set behind peaks of snow-clad mountains in the distance. My little nephew commented that it looked as if the world was on fire. It truly did.

We're baaaack....

...but I wish we weren't!

We spent an amazing week with the Wades, in a beautiful villa, perched on top of a hillside, overlooking an infinity pool which seemingly spilled into a canyon below and the Mediterranean ocean in the distance.

The weather was fantastic the whole week. It only rained once, and that was overnight. The temperatures were in the low 30s Celsius the entire week, but because we were close to the ocean, the air wasn't sticky.

The days were spent either lounging around the pool watching aquatic high jumping (a future Olympic event, no doubt):






...or at one of a couple of beautiful, sandy beaches within a short driving distance from our villa, building sand castles in an ever more heated competition between the girls and the boys (please don't forget to take the poll to your right):




Occasionally we would give the swim wear a rest for a quick excursion to one of the many antiquities around the island:



...before we'd return home to watch the sun set over the ocean from our villa:




As soon as it got dark outside, we'd hit the restaurants for a different flavour every night. We had Asian, Italian and even British pub food (Benjamin's favourite, because they had chicken nuggets!), but mostly we enjoyed local Cypriot dishes with a couple of fantastic meze dinners:



In sum, we had a wonderful week, and we returned to Norway late last night, relaxed, fairly tanned (especially those of us of non-Scandinavian origin) and happy.

[In retrospect, I now see that things had gone too smoothly. I mean, c'mon - all flights on time? That never happens. The Universe was not in balance. The pendulum was about to swing the other way.]

So this morning, we wake up to an email from our house sitting friend Cyril containing the following pictures (sadly with no pointing fingers this time):








Remember our leakage problem? Before we left for Cyprus, we had arranged for our insurance company to have an assessor visit our house, review the damage and provide a quote for any required repairs. We were still debating whether to even make a claim, because we were unsure of whether the cost of the repairs would be sufficiently high to warrant the resulting increase in our premium (don't you love that about insurance companies?).

Evidently, the insurance company decided to make that decision for us and take matters into their own hands! Without any efforts to contact us, and without consulting our friends staying in the house, walls have been torn down and plans are apparently being made to replace the kitchen cabinets?!

Excuse me, Mr. Insurance Agent and Mr. Contractor, I realize you are both...ehem...men...but how many women do you know who'll just let you redo their kitchen without any input?

So now I've done what I do best: I have instructed Mike to tell the insurance agent off! Big time! I have given him a play-by-play description of exactly what he should say when. The conversation has been scripted with no room for error.

Knowing full well that he will do it his own way anyway. Which will clearly be the wrong way, and my - untested - way infinitely better.

My plan (and Mike's, too...I think) is to ask the insurance company to halt all work (with a few pointed questions about why the work was started in the first place without a little something called permission ) and provide the quote that we requested.

Then we will decide what the next step should be. Our poor friends are now living in a construction zone with missing walls, which is hardly what they signed up for. We may just get the walls fixed in the dining room and bedroom, and then get the missing wall in the kitchen drywalled temporarily, until we get back to Canada in the spring. These are all things we will have to figure out in the next few days.

This has been a rude awakening after a week in Paradise. So right now, I am going to pour myself a very large glass of red wine, sit on the couch and wish myself back to...

8:30 pm on September 6, 2007

...and a bit of movie trivia - from what film is this quote taken?

"In the months leading up to my wedding, I was thinking about you all the time. I mean, even on my way there; I'm in the car, a buddy of mine is driving me downtown and I'm staring out the window, and I think I see you, not far from the church, right? Folding up an umbrella and walking into a deli on the corner of 13th and Broadway. And I thought I was going crazy, but now I think it probably was you."