Trondheim Area

Today was not the best day, but not the worst. I got up and turned on the heater to heat up the van before getting out of bed, and just when I was going you get out of bed we started hearing this noise. It almost sounded like a car was in the parking lot with us and playing loud music with the base high and that’s all you could hear, but it wasn’t consistent. We got up and realized it was the heater making that noise and kind of rattling things a bit right above it…which is not great so we turned it off.

We only have a couple of nights left so I looked up what the temps would be overnight and yeah, not great timing! Where we were going to camp for the night is going to be -5C overnight which is cold!! We would need a heater for that for sure! We haven’t been using it overnight as it is so loud it keeps me awake, but in my blankets I’ve been fine as it’s be 4-5C which is apparently not too cold since I sleep warm now…but below freezing…so we called up the van people and they sent us to a place just south of Trondheim, which was about 2 hours away. We headed off to go get it checked out and drove through so much rain. We were making plans on the way of what to do if they couldn’t fix it/it would take days, etc. I looked up how far south we could go before it got too cold overnight…and it was only about an hour from Trondheim, then it was going to be really cold. And cold for too long to drive to the other side of it today.

So we show up at the repair place and turn the heater on and let it run for like 15 min…and no noise. I was like this is like last trip with the check engine light! We explained what was happening to the guy and he said it sounded like a fan and it should be fine to keep running it if it happened again as long as there was not an error message…so we shall see…I think our plan is to turn it off if it starts making the noise and let it be, then turn it on again when needed. Luckily the van heats up pretty quickly so it should be okay for 2 nights. We decided to not go too far and still camp in the warmer location just in case it really stops working (plus I still don’t trust it to run overnight in case something really goes wrong while we are sleeping!). We have warm layers, but don’t want to sleep in a below freezing car! Tomorrow we should be through the coldest area and should be okay again. But kind of annoying and just a little stressful….

We just ran the heater for about 20 min to see if it was still okay (and warm up) and it seems to be working fine so who knows what happened this morning. It at least was nice the repair place was where we were going to drive today anyways instead of way out of the way like last time. I just told Raymond on the plus side if it hadn’t have happened this morning I wouldn’t have checked the weather and we would be in freezing cold right now! And probably not sleep very well. I didn’t think to check how cold it would be as we are so much farther south! I can’t believe now is when we are getting the really cold weather, not in the arctic! But we might see some snow tomorrow which would be awesome as it was supposed to snow along the route today (and supposed to be clear and cold tomorrow so hopefully no issues driving)!

After the repair shop it was lunchtime so we had some lunch and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of the day. Raymond was like we don’t have to do anything, and I was like we have been stuck in the car all morning I need to walk!! So I tried to find some trails nearby (the ones I was going to do were closer to where we parked last night or about an hour south of where we are parked for the night so would add a lot of extra driving and it was 2C down there and rain headed that way so not great weather! I couldn’t find anything, no walks along the river, nothing, so I looked north again and found some easy walks through the woods overlooking Trondheim so we decided to do that as it wasn’t far. It was sunny and gorgeous when we got there which was nice and the walk was a nice forest walk. Lots of evergreen trees and moss everywhere! It was so nice to stretch my legs! And more leaves on the trees turning colors again!

Then on to camp and it is not the nicest place, right by the road, but should be fine noise wise, but there is a small river next to us. They must not have gotten as much rain down here as it is really low! But you can still hear it a bit in the van so that is nice. We have another camper already that joined us so we shall see if we get more neighbors tonight!Read more