I was supposed to get Ikea deliver my furniture today, but they called me in the morning to say that the car is broken so they will have to postpone it for tomorrow. My cabin is cursed, for sure. So I had to come up with a plan B, and quick. No vacation is complete without a trip abroad, right? So I drove to Norway.

My first stop after the Norwegian border was just before Brekken to have a look at the Ryfossen waterfalls that I discovered last year and thought were fabulous. The weather was overcast, so it was ideal for waterfalls. But last year when I was there, I was with my sister and I was only half concentrated on finding the best details. Now that I was fully concentrated, I didn’t think it was as good as I thought it had been and I only really found one detail I was happy with. I got the impression that the water level was quite high though and it looked like it would be possible to jump across with just a little less water in the stream, so maybe there will be more ops then.

I continued my journey to the Syldammen dam. It’s a bit funny driving the last bit to Syldammen which is on the Swedish side of the border, because for a moment the road curves in and out of the countries. So in order to reach something in Sweden, I had to drive to Norway and then in Sweden, back to Norway, and once again back to Sweden. No customs to drive through, though!

The reason I drove to Syldammen was to find the glacier buttercup. I had a description that there would be hundreds of them just 200 meters downstream from the dam. What the description didn’t say was which side of the river, but with only a couple of hundreds of meters, I’ll easily do both. So I started from the near side, and very soon had a couple of birds of prey circle above my head, screaming an alarm. I saw that on the opposite side of the river, there was a steep cliff so I assumed that the birds had a nest there. So I moved further away from the shoreline, I didn’t see any possible location for the glacier buttercup anyway. Since I didn’t have a GPS with me and SportsTracker doesn’t start tracking without a connection, I couldn’t really say how far I had gone but surely it was more than 200 meters. With no buttercups of any kind, I turned back and made sure to walk even further away from the assumed bird nest (but still the birds sounded their alert above my head). But this was a problem – if they reacted like this to me when I was on the opposite side, what would they do when I was approaching the cliff from the same side? So I decided to try it and turn back as soon as the birds got agitated. Said and done, I probably got just as far as 200 meters but no buttercups here either.

Now what? Had I completely misunderstood the description? While I was walking on the far side, I had spotted a patch of snow behind a group of buildings. So what if the ”dammbyggnad” (literally, dam building) referred to these buildings and not the actual dam? And glacier buttercups love the late patches of snow. So I felt good about that, I figured it must be it. Except… no glacier buttercups, nothing that even hinted at their existence. With nothing better to do, I decided to climb up on the nearest peak (not high!) and while doing it, I got those birds of prey on my case again. Either the birds hate me or then there are two pairs of them but I was seriously doubting about my nest theory now. Maybe I could walk further on that other side of the river anyway… but it felt hopeless, I figured my best chance of finding them had been this patch of snow. All I wanted now was to drive back, I had some blue sky already and metre by metre the clouds were creeping up on Sylarna so maybe I could see the peak from some nice viewpoint along the road.

No new furniture, no glacier buttercup and no mountaintop on the way. Still, it was a good day. Weird, huh?