Canada for real

 (we continue our stories from Norway)

 Our life as farmers came to a sudden end in the early nineties, when feed prices were sky-high and pork fell to an all-historic low. We simply could not make it worth our while to continue.

After we had sold all machinery (we kept the farm) we moved on to greener pastures. We worked in the tourism industry for a while until Bea found a steady job in a travel agency in Lillehammer. The city had hosted the Winter Olympics in 1994 and was a boom town in 1998, when we moved the 300km to town.

 

While Bea was busy in her office, I found out that it would be a good time to build a house. We purchased a lot in a little hamlet south of the city and I started clearing the lot from trees. At the same time we sold our farm up north. The distance from Lillehammer was too big to being able to maintain the buildings and the yard, so the sale made common sense.

I wanted to live in an old log home again and started looking for some old buildings we could move to our lot. Finally I found an old one-room-school which I could purchase. Now, in Europe one can not move an entire house on a truck, like people do in North America. Besides, the structure needed major repairs which made it necessary to take the building apart. Beginning in August 1999 the house came down in parts and pieces. Every log had to be numbered with a code. That way it should be possible to re-build the structure in a new location.

On a rainy night in late September a truck arrived and all logs got loaded up. We were completely soaked when we finished at  2am. The next day the load arrived at our building lot.

Our neighbors must have been snickering about the doubtful looking heap of logs being piked up along the street.

Within the next 11 months the hopeless looking task of a construction project evolved into a nice looking new home. By that time the neighbors had stopped snickering and were paying us curious visits to see for themselves.

We lived in that house until may 2002, when major changes had ocurred.

Read more tomorrow: CANADA for real