Happy, the friendly frog

The Langfossen Waterfall is a tourist attraction. You only have to walk about 50 meters from the parking lot to see it. However, Sherpas from Nepal have built a staircase next to the waterfall, and you can climb several hundred meters in elevation there. Of course, we did that.

Later on our trip, we visited a museum. It’s a hydroelectric power plant that was in operation from 1908 to 1989.
Nilpferd is always really enthusiastic when he sees old technology. But there was also interesting information about the social problems of that time: The British had promised the locals great wealth and bought the waterfalls and water rights from them, but the people remained just as poor as before while the British got rich.

Then we continued our journey to Hemsedal, where we climbed a mountain today.
We didn’t meet anyone other on the ascent, and we made our way off-trail through a landscape of rocks and scree. There was even a brief shower of snow for a while, but after a short time the sky was blue again. The rule Nilpferd learned from a local during his first visit to Norway over 25 years ago still is true today: “If you don’t like the weather, just wait 10 minutes.”

Although the cache is already 6 years old, we were the fourth ones to visit it.

During the last few days, we’ve been exploring Hardangervidda, a mountain plateau about 1,000 meters above sea level with many lakes and swarms of mosquitoes - at least in the summer. But luckily, nighttime temperatures are already about 6°C, and even the toughest mosquito can’t survive that.
On Saturday, it was raining the whole day, so we didn’t leave the camper van. But on Sunday, the weather was good again, and we planned to hike off-trail up to Mt. Kistenuten. however 300 meters below the summit, the rocks - covered with moss and lichen - were so wet and slippery from the previous day’s rain that Nilpferd canceled the hike.
Luckily, there are plenty of mountains around here, so we were still able to climb another peak.
Monday brought perfect weather, which was exactly what we needed to climb Store Nup. It was a 22-km hike with 1,050 meters of elevation gain, and most of it was off-trail over large boulders. There were even snowfields along the way.
After almost 12 hours, we were back at our camper van. That cold beer tasted so good!
And today was a bit more relaxing, but with 16 km, it wasn’t really a rest day either.
The cache at the summit of Mt. Vesle Nup seems to have disappeared (there were already two DNFs before us), but it was a great hike through the blueberry bushes, which were already in their autumn colors.

Same procedure as last year, we’re heading north again. While the area north of the Polar Circle was our main destination last year, this year’s focus will be on southern Norway.
On the way there, we spent a night in Germany's northernmost major city, Flensburg, and took a look around the town. The harbor is quite nice, but I found the large rhino standing above the entrance to the City Hall and the shoes hanging from steel cables stretched across the street more interesting. It's some kind of artwork, but even Nilpferd didn't quite understood it.

Before the ferry departed from Hirtshals (Denmark), we still had time to climb an old lighthouse from 1860. From the top, you can see an area with 69 German bunkers from World War II, where we spent quite a while exploring everything.

Our first hike in Norway was something special and took us along a flume, a kind of wooden channel where water previously flowed and through which tree trunks were transported from the forest.
This route is nearly 4 km long and even crosses suspension bridges and passes through an 80-meter-long tunnel that isn’t too high.
And a short detour to a lost place, a power plant that was in operation from 1900 to 1957, was also very interesting.

A few weeks ago, Nilpferd went on a nature field trip and reported that he had seen yellow-bellied toads there. Since toads are distant relatives of frogs, I wanted to meet them too.
It was a short bicycle ride from Nilpferd’s home, and after 45 minutes we came to a puddle in the woods. It was definitely no more than 4 square meters. At first, we didn’t see anything. They probably didn’t know that I’m completely harmless, even though I’m much bigger than they are.
But then they came up to the surface. They were very young toads, and they were very small - barely 2 cm long.
So cute!

Today there's a solar eclipse!
Fortunately, Nilpferd had saved the special glasses that let you look directly at the sun from the total solar eclipse in 1999 (and, incredibly, he even remembered exactly where he’d kept them all these years), so we were perfectly prepared to go to Mt. Peretshofer Höhe, a small hill a few kilometers south of Nilpferd’s house.
We weren’t the only ones who’d had this idea, though - but luckily, there’s plenty of space up there.
With perfect visibility, we were able to watch the solar eclipse, and we even saw a few sunspots on the sun’s surface.
Once the sun had gone down, the show wasn’t over yet. Starting at 10:30 p.m., the Perseids came out. They were predicted to be 100 per hour, and there really were a lot of them.
It was very difficult for Nilpferd to get a photo of them. They were always in a different spot in the sky, and it took 38 shots before Nilpferd finally got one in a photo.
Photographing the Milky Way was much easier.
We stayed at the summit until after 2 a.m., and I went to bed at 3 a.m.