Pupletts in Sweden: Norway (27 Dec 24 - 10 Jan 2025)

After leaving Lillehammer early in the morning, we headed towards our final Norwegian stop, Veggli.

We were planning to meet out friend, Thomas, and stay at the Veggli cabin that we had visited earlier that year (in June). It would be a good chance to see Thomas again before we had to head back to Australia and a relaxing time before the craziness of finalising the move.

Thomas gave us instructions on which roads to travel in order to avoid the worst of the snow, but not far along the drive we came to a detour which forced us to make a quick decision - and we ended up taking the wrong road. It wasn't too bad at first, the road had snow on it, but was pretty clear, but then we came to a big yellow sign that was written in Norwegian. We had three options - turn around (which would have been about a 2 hour detour), follow the road ahead (which ended in a huge snow bank in about 20m) or turn down the road with the yellow sign.

I managed to translate a little of the sign, it mentioned something about road closures but it seemed to be only applicable during the night. Either way we didn't have a lot of choice and the road looked passable. It was only 25km to the major road...

The previous road, when there was actually other traffic..

The road didn't start off too badly...

but it rapidly got worse. It narrowed to just over the width of a car and there was a big line of snow running down the middle of the road that we had to push through. Chunks of snow were falling from the nearby trees and the snow was whipping up around us. Kris concentrated on keeping the car from sliding or getting stuck and I quietly prayed to a plethora of gods and goddesses that we didn't get stuck either by sliding into the soft snow on the side of the road, wedged on the snow rise in the centre, or stuck at a slope that our front-wheel drive couldn't get up.

Somehow we made it, big credit goes to Kristine's driving, but the main excitement came when we got to the end of the road and the temperature meter for the car went from reading an outside temp of -23 to -10 to -5 to 0 to 15 and then to 23 degrees.

We quickly pulled over and removed all the snow that was stuck in our makeshift snow plough:

The road did not look too bad in the summer pics on Google Maps:

Once we'd cleared the snow from the front of the car, we finally could relax a little as we headed onto the main road.

We arrived at the Veggli shopping centre where we met Thomas and stopped for a coffee/hot chocolate.

The plant pots showed the amount of snowfall

The Veggli Troll

After getting our shopping and coffees, we followed Thomas up the mountain to the cabin. After having survived the FV100 snowy road and the smaller roads up the mountain we finally ran into trouble right outside the door of the cabin...

The driveway was mostly full of snow, and Thomas managed to pull in. We stopped on the road just behind him. The driveway to the next cabin was empty and Thomas suggested we could park there, but unfortunately our two wheel drive finally had its first taste of defeat, slipping on the ice and not being able to get traction. Kris tried to back up and use the recovery tracks which we had success with at other times but in the end the car slipped into the softer snow at the side of the road and got stuck.

We tried for a while to get the car back on the road but had no luck. Fortunately the road was clear enough and closed just past the cabin so we weren't at risk of blocking the road or being hit. In the end, Thomas managed to get in touch with the plough driver for the area and the following day he came past and helped pull us clear.