Alt for Norge Daily Journal: Day 11 - May 3, 2012 (Episode 2)

Today was a fun day that started with our next team competition and ended with us sleeping as a team out in a cabin up in the mountains!

Some of the views from our bus ride on the way! Absolutely beautiful!

They had us get packed and on the bus pretty early in the morning, so we could go pick up the film crew. On the way, the scenery slowly changed from green countryside to more and more snow! It was quite the ride! This huge bus that we’re on had to keep making these 180 degree turns, while going up this steep mountainside. I don’t know how the bus driver was able to make some of them!

Standing in front of a 15 foot snow drift. Left a little note for
Logan and Zoe (my daughters).

The cast waiting for our next competition.

Eventually, we arrived at the crew’s hotel, where the snow drifts were about 10 to 15 feet high! Quickly, we loaded the bus with the crew and were off to a small town, between several mountains and next to a fjord, called Skjolden. There, we did some shots of us walking over a bridge and up to a parking lot on the side of a fjord. It was then that Henriette introduced us to our next competition. In front of us were two cars and two tables, each covered with several different objects.

The competition would be for each team to run to the table, choose five items that they believed were essential to a Hyttetur (a cabin vacation), then pack those five items, all of our luggage, and five team members into these smaller cars! The fastest team to do so, would win the challenge! One catch was that each team would be administered a 30 second add-on to their total time for each “essential” item that they got wrong, so it was important to choose wisely. As for winning and losing, we thought that this challenge would determine which team would be going to the elimination challenge, but were surprised to hear that the winning team would simply get an advantage in another competition that we would be doing the next day. The losing team of that competition would be heading to the elimination challenge and sending one of their members home!

After doing some interviews and strategizing we took our marks. (By the way, funny note about the strategizing. You could really see who the “players” were during the downtime that took place between the announcement of the challenge and the actual challenge itself. Austin, Tara and I spent a lot of that time figuring out exactly who should be doing what when we pack the car. You could see some of this going on with the other team as well, but not to the extent that we were doing. Then, there were several others on both teams that were just hanging out and passing the time. It was my first true glimpse into who was playing “the game” to the full extent!) The Blue Team (Austin, Tara, Johnathan, Mary Caryl, Amy, and myself), would be given a 30 second head start for winning the competition from Episode 1. We got started and immediately ran to the table to discover all of the items that were hidden under a sheet. After some quick decision making, we chose the oranges, apples, toilet paper, black currant concentrate, and strawberry-rhubarb juice. Then, as strategized, we ran to the car. I handled packing the back, with Amy and Johnathan bringing me the bags. Tara and Austin worked on getting five sets of skis tied to the top, with Mary Caryl bringing them supplies. As we progressed, we had Amy get in the middle of the back seat, packed some things on her, then Johnathan and Mary Caryl got in, packing things on top of them as well. Once everything was close to the end, Tara and Austin would jump in the front seats and any remaining items would be thrown on top of them. Everything worked like clockwork! All of our planning really helped and once the doors were closed. I jumped on the hood of the car and began celebrating while watching the other team finish up well after we were done. In fact, they thought they were done and everyone was in the car, but the back trunk door ended up popping back up and Alf had to go back to close it a second time! In fact, Alf put so much force into closing it this time that he put two large dents in the back! Oops! (I’m not innocent either. I noticed that my jeans put some decent scratches in the hood of the car when I jumped on it! Sorry!)

A little hard to see, but there are two large dents

that Alf put into this car! A strong man!

After doing some interviews, they had us line up again so Henriette could announce the winners. We ended up getting two items wrong. The apples and strawberry-rhubarb were wrong and should have been replaced with the Yahtsee game and Kvik Lunsj (a chocolate bar). We would add one minute to our time. However, the Red Team ended up getting some wrong as well, so it was basically a wash. (They actually chose the scuba gear! Not sure what they were
thinking!) With that information, we all knew the outcome, the Blue Team was the winner, which is what Henriette announced shortly after. However, apparently they needed some more shots of the reactions, so they did that same announcement four separate times! That was really strange and uncomfortable to have to celebrate your win over and over again in front of the losing team. I don’t think any of us liked that. To wrap it all up, Henrietta revealed that we would actually be heading to a cabin for our own Hyttetur! (Which we were later informed would be for four nights!) We were all pretty excited about that, until we arrived at the cabins.

The views on our drive up to the cabin! It was
unbelievable how much snow there was!

After a 30 minute drive, we arrived at our cabins, which were buried way up in the mountains! There, we found five buildings: a larger cabin for the Red Team, a smaller cabin for the Blue Team, two smaller dilapidated cabins that were empty, and an outhouse! Outside of the outhouse, it was a pretty incredible sight with mountains and snow everywhere. Plus, it stayed light out until around midnight! When we were able to go in our cabin, we realized that as old as they looked from the outside, they were pretty nice inside, just small. Due to this, Mary Caryl and Amy shared a queen size bed in one bedroom, Austin and Johnathan slept on cots in the living room, and Tara and I slept in a bunk bed in the other room (I was chosen out of the three guys because I snored the least and Tara is a light sleeper). After getting settled in, we went to the other cabin for dinner. Unfortunately, because the cabins didn’t have any running water, we had to boil down snow for water, which took a long time. That and prepping all of the food resulted in us not getting to actually eat until 10:00 P.M.! Finally, we got settled in and went to bed. It was a long day, but fun! Now, we just have to get ready for our competition tomorrow! (By the way, we were told later that these cabins were a last second substitute. Apparently, we were supposed to be staying in one large cabin that not only didn’t have running water, but didn’t have electricity either! Fortunately for us, but unfortunately for the program, the cabin was snowed in and we couldn’t get to it.)