It has been a while since our last update, but the last three or four weeks have been crazy busy and there has been little time left over for filling the pages of this blog. So many things have happened, and it all started with Pa Gaz' arrival in Norway. James, Isabelle and myself were about 20 minutes late to pick him up at the airport, we thought it should take us just over 2 hours when it ended up being 2.5-2.75 - which wouldn't have been that bad if it weren't for the fact that his plane was about 30 minutes early... Poor Garry seemed pretty tired when we finally arrived to collect him, but Isabelle of course could not help put a smile on his face.
We had a quick snack and put Isabelle into her pyjamas, before returning to Larvik. We spent a couple of days at home with my parents, giving Garry time to get acclimatised. I returned to Oslo on Thursday as I had a presentation/Tapas night with my future employers at PwC, which was lots of fun, and the three other Quinns followed suit on Friday. We had dinner with the Skilbrei's, and enjoyed a long walk around the Oslo CBD. Saturday morning we walked across the road from where we were staying to check out the newly built opera-house which opened last year - it is quite beautiful and you can actually walk on the roof in summer-time.
If you turn 90 degrees to the left from where the above photo is taken, you look straight at the PwC-building. PwC is one of the main sponsors of the opera, which means we will be getting free tickets every once in a while! There is a lot of development going on in the area, as you can see, and they are even moving the freeway underground, which will make the place even nicer.
The rest of that Saturday we spent looking at properties in an area just North of Oslo, called Skedsmo. Most of the houses we looked at was not really what we were after, but we really loved one of the properties. However, Easter was coming up, and we decided to leave the decision-making until after the owners had completed their planned 'open for inspection' a couple of weeks later.
Other activities while Garry was visiting included shovelling snow (spreading it out so it would melt faster in the sun)...
Other activities while Garry was visiting included shovelling snow (spreading it out so it would melt faster in the sun)...
...and car-yard hiking... 
...the reason for this particular hiking-tour was that after a return trip to Oslo in our 10-year old Kia (which by the way carried the name Leelah), Pa Gaz decided his grand-daughter needed a much safer car to drive around in, and so now we are the extremely lucky (and proud) owners of a brand new VW Golf!! Will put photos up later...
