Isn’t it nice to get a call from someone?  Well, we got a call from my husband’s aunt. She lives in the same city as we do. She asked  if I’d like to join her and two other ladies from church to go on a tour. Not just some kind of tour, a blueberry picking tour. My heart just melted. Me? I love blueberries!

I prepared myself for the next day. I gathered some plastic bags for the “hunt”. I never really went on a blueberry picking tour. I picked some last year when we were at the cabin, but we only did it for some minutes. So I was pretty excited. The only thing I thought was a little stupid was that I left my climbing shoes at my parents’ house. What could be so bad with going with my flip-flops I got the other day?

They picked me up and took a quick shot in our small tiny house. Then suddenly all eyes were pointed at my feet.
“Don’t you have any other shoes?”
“Well, I left my climbing shoes in Belgium…”
“Do you have any long socks or stockings?”
Thoughts going through my mind: What?? Socks? It’s summer! I’m already melting…
“Well, I do have  a pair of flat red shoes that I usually wear to church…”
“That’s better than flip-flops or nothing. There could be snakes in the high grass!” was the response.  Oops, snakes? Here in Norway?
But where were my socks? My husband found me some: blue knee socks with holes… Jeej!
I felt enormously pretty with those blue socks combined with my red shoes. Not!
I forgot about the socks and the shoes. I just went out of the car. I got to loan a berry picker rake. A red one. I love red. It’s my favorite colour. I just followed the others. First we had to walk over a small unstable ‘bridge’ that was built from two small tree trunks. I just knew I was in Norway. Just to hear the sound of the crippling water in the creek, the wind blowing through the trees, the smell of nature… We just went a little up the mountain and on our way we found the blackberries. It went quite fast with the blueberry picker rake even though I thought I was the slowest of the four of us. The higher we got, the more insects came. Annoying buzzing flies and wasps. I didn’t want to get wasp stings. Neither did I want a snakebite. The whole thing of a snake coming unseen through the high grass just kept going through my mind. I just got goosebumps. I tried to keep my mind on the blueberries but then the annoying flies and wasps came back. Just in time they asked me if I was hungry. I was starving.

They say everything tastes better in nature. I thought it was just some joke or bragging about how good this land was, but I have to admit: food does taste better in the mountains. I ate my two slices of bread with –believe it or not – ham and strawberry jam. It sounds weird but I love the combination of sweet and salt taste. You should try it some time.

I was done picking berries. I sorted the leaves and small twigs from the blueberries in the camping chair my husband’s aunt took with her. I was done for today. I came home with almost 4 kg blueberries. Sounds fair to me!