24 july empty villages and women

this photo was take in Roros, a village on the Unesco world heritage list


I have stuck to the secondary roads as much as possible but the further south I come the more the traffic heats up, we are talking a car every 5 minutes so not exactly 5th Avenue .
The surroundings are starting to soften, more farmland cut out into the forests and the mountains have lost their steepness. The villages are still few and far between, they are more like a collection of houses randomly placed along a kilometer of road or so and when I fly through ( such is my fitness at the moment ! ) there is barely any life to be detected, certainly from what life there is I can see that the good looking girls have left town a long time ago, not that I am in the market I hasten to add but it is nice to browse, click on "add to basket" without actually going through with the purchase.
Like a lot of small towns in New Zealand there is no heart to these places, just a main drag and you know you are in the centre when the houses are built a bit closer together and sometimes there is a Dairy ( local shop for non NZ readers ).
All of a sudden I hit an entirely different kind of town that I could not place in any category and it t does make life a lot easier as we know to put people and places in boxes in our little brains just for future reference.
On both sides of the main road of this town called Otnes where flagposts situated every 50 meters or so and this went on for about a kilometer. Since all the properties along the street were beautifully maintained houses with immaculate lawns and lovely trees I wasn't sure whether I was entering a military cemetry or a small town in Alabama. I found it very creepy, this kind of patriotism, imagine the traitors who voted against the plan when it went through council, they have probably all moved to the North Cape.
The norwegians do like their flag a lot, every second house has one flying, presumably so they are reminded where they live when they wake up each morning.
Earlier this morning I had an entirely more positive experience when I stopped to have a look at a barn that was decorated on the front with wood carvings of soldiers ( like the tin ones we used to play with ) and animals. As I took the photo the farmer approached me and asked me where I was from, this is a difficult question for me by the way, if only they would ask where do you live or what nationality are you but no they want the long version.
Anyway we got talking about the barn and then I started asking him questions about his other ginormous barn, 200 years old I was told and completely built out of massive logs, it even had a ramp made from logs inside so horse and cart or later on tractors could drive up to the second floor where the hay was stored. I had seen farmers cutting the grass and putting it green inside these barns and he showed me how they have huge fans underneath that dry the grass while inside, this is due to the unpredictable weather around here, I could attest to that as the temperature dropped to minus 4 last night and the water in my bottles were frozen.
Then I asked him what kind of farm it was, milk he said. so how many cows did he have ? He looked a bit embarrassed when he said 13, he had read about New Zealand dairy farms obviously.
Did he make a living out of that I asked. Well with a bit of forestry on his property and his wife working in town they could manage, I should say at this point that what norwegians call manage is slightly different from our "manage", he had a brand new Volvo on the driveway and a stately home, so unless the bank owned the lot he was managing alright.