So on Monday we started our holiday with shopping. Shopping in Kvadrat, the big shopping center of the Stavanger area. A real shopping madhouse, as we did not buy that much clothing for each other for a long while, so it was allowed and a part of our holiday savings. New clothing is anyway better for the summer and for if you have an office job (Theresa). You got to look good.

Well anyway afterwards we had a lunch and went for a biking trip around our area. This became a quite long trip and we arrived about 2-3 hours before we had to pick Richard up from the airport.
So after our trip Theresa went cleaning up a little more, taking a shower and in the meantime I made macaroni ham and cheese and mown the lawn. By the time we were done with that, we had no time to eat anymore but instead had to run for the airport to pick Richard up. He arrived quite soon and so we met up and went home, where we finally ate our macaroni ham and cheese together with Richard at 00.00am whereafter we all went to bed.

The following day...we had some appointments running, so we decided to go for the area of Stavanger and Sandnes to look around. We visited Stavanger center, made some lovely pictures, visited the Domsteinene and the Three Swords, made beautiful pictures there as well. Richard had a very expensive beer at a terrace that had no food served (believe 7 euro or something).

I unfortunately can't remember the exact days for each activity, but I will describe globally which ones we did. I believe we went for Preikestolen trip on wednesday. After baking off bread and preparing food, drinks and cameras we took the car over the E13 towards the ferry that takes us to the foot of the mountain range. The trip up to the top of Preikestolen - a somewhat flat rock on top of a mountain with a sheer 300m drop to the Fjord below, looking like a preacher chair - would take only 2 hours they said on the map. Well.. it took us at least 4 hours up and perhaps a little less down. It was an unbelievable beautiful but hard trip. We had also some rain showers during the trip, which made it even more dangerous. Theresa climbed up like it was nothing. Richard and Steven both had some troubles and even damaged themselves a little during the trip, which was all been treated well by Dr. Richard.

Beautiful pictures from that trip have been made, some are already available on facebook, will post more pictures on our weblog gallery as soon as I have time for it.

On thursday we decided to go to Setesdal, visiting Laura and Hallvard at their house and walking around in the beautiful and quite different nature up there. We arrived there in the late afternoon where we enjoyed a supper and a movie. On friday Richard, Laura and me decided to go for a trip to the 'hytte' and back. A holiday bungalow far away from civilization up in the mountains. It's part of Hallvards' land owned by his family for sheep herding history. A beautiful place without telephone or internet connectivity, let alone water and electricity. Hallvard has installed a basic sunpanel for readinglights and has a gas oven for boiling water and making soup. An outside toilet for those who need and a there's water all around in nature to use for cooking (although you can take it aswell with on the two hour long trip from your car to the hytte ofcourse).
Richard had wet socks after the trip (or was it because of stepping into a river instead of crossing it?) and dried them in front of the fire he created (yeah there's a wood oven aswell). Steven wrote in the hytte-book and together they ate some lovely soup Laura prepared (betasoup - vegetable soup from package with added nature water). In the meanwhile Hallvard worked around the farm while Theresa baked muffins to eat when we arrived back from our trip.

We enjoyed nice food prepared by Laura and muffins from Theresa and watched another movie in the library.
On saturday morning after breakfast and perhaps even a lunch (I can't remember that) we decided to drive back to Stavanger. We drove past Manafossen, a place where a waterfall is to be seen, but didn't take the trip up yet as it was so late in the afternoon and we were still rather tired in our legs and feet of that trip to preikestolen, but promised ourselves to try it a little later.

At home we could finally relax, ate our dinner and watched most likely another movie.. or perhaps we played some Terraria on our own server.

On sunday afternoon we went to Algård where you could bike over an old trainline between two villages. Richard made a fantastic movie about this with his photocamera which is to be seen on youtube: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnjaDV5Uqk] rommegrot i algård.

On monday we made a trip to Manafossen, finally. This wasn't a too hard trip afterall, just a little steep and on some places you needed to hang onto the ropes and iron cables to pull yourself up. I wouldn't take my parents up there, but perhaps well-trained mountainclimbers Laura and Hallvard sometime near in the future (after the winter, as I am writing this article quite late). The view is fantastic and can be seen by anyone, on our website. We made some nice pictures including a picture of us three together.

Tuesday was a day of ultimate relaxation, sleeping long I think and eating late. Perhaps there were more pictures made or movies seen. I believe we also went out for dinner, paid by Richard. Can't remember exactly whether that was on this tuesday or not, but I remember we did one day. Which was at a hotel I ate before with Theresa with my work. The people who made the dinner at the time we went there with my work, must have left in the meantime or something, because the  of that day sucked.. sorry for my language. The deermeat was tough, they replaced our fantastic desert with something that didn't even come close to what we ordered. I called for the boss and they were rude. I refused to pay for the desert and sent it back to the kitchen.

Well that was then perhaps the only negative thing of the whole holidays so it doesn't matter too much.

On wednesday Richard was going to take the plane back to Holland. We drove him to the airport and said goodbye, went to our emergency appointment with the Fysiotherapist and then had to drive to Oslo for our further holiday plans. We stayed there at a friend and went to Tusenfryd, a rollercoasterpark. Later that night I received an sms from Richard that he was finally home, after a two hour delay (on top of the two hours train traveling time in Holland) on the train from Schiphol to Hengelo.

We had a great time with Richard, we thank him for his stay and all the nice times.
We also had a great time in Oslo by the way and that made the end of the holidays for me. Theresa had another week free to go, I had to return back to work as a collegue of mine had to have his holiday.