To Each their Own

Day 6 (July 1st) 

We love taking trips together. It’s an amazing privilege to travel together and experience different landscapes, cultures, cuisines, and wildlife with the one you love so deeply. Traveling has been an individual passion before we first met, a topic we bonded over when we met, and it will continue to be part of how we raise our family together. 

One thing we realized throughout our (now 4.5) years of travelling together is that we both enjoy some solo time to pursue our individual passions. Today was that day for us.

After spending the morning together enjoying a hearty breakfast at our hotel, we packed up and Christian dropped Rochelle in a neighboring town at a coffee shop. Christian had lined up a full-day of birding with a local guide he met online. 

Rochelle’s Day:

In the past, a typical solo day would’ve included a beautiful hike or excursion, but now, my pace of life has slowed down quite a bit. While the nausea has diminished to only maybe showing up 5-10% of my day (when I need to eat), the tiredness has stuck around, so I knew it was best to have an intentionally slow day as we were only ½ way through our trip. One luxury I hadn’t enjoyed in pregnancy was a prenatal massage. A few new “third trimester symptoms” showed up during our trip, one of them being incredibly sore hips (likely due to not lugging our human sized pregnancy pillow on this trip), so the thought of getting a massage sounded incredible. But, as I’ve learned to never hold things too tightly, I knew the chances of finding a masseuse with openings in 48 hours notice was low.

Most days, I invite the Lord into my morning and ask Him how He wants my day to go. I did the same for this day off and knew that if a massage was meant to happen, it would. Upon looking into massage studios, there were only a small # of masseuses in all of Lofoten who did prenatal massages, one place called Swell caught my eye because she happened to be only 7 minutes from where we were staying in Svolvaer. When hopping into Selena’s (Swell’s Owner) booking page I saw she was only open one day a week, at which point I realized it was the exact day I was free, AND she had openings for the day I wanted- what a blessing!  

My day started with spending a slow hour at a coffee shop journaling and going through “Refresh” (a Sabbath journal a friend of mine wrote). The hour passed quickly and before I knew it, it was time to head upstairs to my massage. The masseuse, Selena, and I quickly connected and felt like old friends. Typically, I prefer silence during my massages, but she was sharing so much rich wisdom and comfort with me about birth and what to expect being a Mom, that I couldn’t help but hang onto every word she was saying. I felt like I was supposed to be right there in that moment. 

The massage wrapped up and I ventured on a walk to a lodge overlooking the water to grab lunch that Selena recommended I check out. It was a perfect time to process all she shared with me and contemplate the miraculous experience I was going to have in a few short months. As I’ve shared with a few others, it is challenging to wrap my head around the fact that the most physically challenging feat I will experience as a woman does not allow the ability for training. Other challenges, such as a triathlon, submitting a mountain or doing a century bike ride all allowed me months of physical training, yet, for birth, I have to simply stay rooted in trust and train mentally and spiritually. 

After hailing a cab back to our accommodations, a short discussion with the cab driver who’s from Iran about all the politics and strife his home country is experiencing, I was back before I knew it. I spent the evening making some pasta, adding items to our baby registry, and intentionally relaxing. I turned in about an hour before christian was expected back and couldn’t wait to hear about his day.

Christian’s Day: 

Warning: the following is long and about birds. If you read the summary it won’t hurt my feelings

Summary: Christian went birding with Charles, searching for birds he hadn’t seen yet in Norway.

From Christian:

I met Charles in the pouring rain at a well-known birding spot an hour’s drive from our hotel in Svolvaer, approximately halfway between my hotel and the village where he lived in the southern Lofoten islands. Charles moved from Montana to Norway after deciding with his wife they wanted a more rural and wild life, close to the activities and wild places they both loved. His wife Rachel (Rachel Pohl art) inspired Rochelle to learn about the Lofoten Islands after seeing her posts of the beautiful hikes and Mountain View’s, the seed for this trip was planted. Exploring birding guides in Lofoten, I found their website and reached out, and now here we were. 

The covered observation blind kept us dry as we chatted while scanning over the tufted ducks, greylag geese, common gulls, and various types of shorebirds that milled about on the water, unaffected by the weather. We had lots in common—both focusing on birds in our studies and a shared love for bowhunting, and conservation work. Charles was doing important shorebird monitoring here in Norway, and is a driving force for positive change through storytelling and on the ground conservation work. 

 The driving sheets of rain kept most of the birds sitting on the water, so after our initial scan through our binoculars, we’d tallied about 25 different species of birds. My first new bird for the day was a Northern Lapwing, a shorebird with a fancy upward-turned crest that has appeared in North America infrequently as a rare vagrant some winters in the northeast. I’d never seen one, and this has been my first trip with a high likelihood of spotting one. We saw one distantly across the lake fly over a horse pasture and land in the tall grass, which was important nesting habitat. Many field-nesting birds are imperiled in Europe, as a combination of habitat destruction, climate change, and persecution on wintering grounds has decimated bird populations across their breeding range. 

We stopped at another location, a vacant horse racing track, where closer views of lapwings were had. Then we drove out to the coast to a tiny village that hosts one of the best surf breaks in this part of the world. If you’ve seen a surf film with winter scenes of swells and steep mountain peaks, it was likely filmed here. The views before me as we climbed up to an alpine lake were reminiscent of the western Aleutians, with the steep green slopes and boulder fields with northern wheatears, A single arctic loon blended into the rippled water as the wind etched temporary patterns across the lake’s surface. We found our primary target- a ring ouzel—a thrush like bird of the mountain habitat that I had never seen before. We found a female feeding young.

Alpine habitat

We searched a large grove of conifers for songbirds, and hit the jackpot. Every fifth tree had a nest in it of some type, many being used this season by the thrush. Similar to our Robin, the Fieldfare is strikingly patterned with a pale gray head, peach-colored breast with dark spots. One of the lower nests I peeked into while the parents were nearby gathering food, and found a beautiful scene of several eggs and newly-hatched young.

Newly-hatched Fieldfare chicks

Next we stopped at several ponds to observe whooper swans, and the wind was still blowing hard enough to stifle most bird activity. 

A whooper swan in the wind-blown grass

Our final stop together was a beautiful alpine lake near Nusfjord, the fishing village where Rochelle and I had explored earlier in the week on our drive north. We saw more songbirds here, including the beautiful Bullfinch, (sometimes called the “Christmas bird” due to its colors) greenfinch, and others. We ran into some young common gull chicks which blended in nicely with the road, camouflaged by their downy plumage. 

Hidden lake at Nusfjord

A young gull chick

The 8 hours flew by as we talked and slowly birded our way across the landscape. By the end of our visit, Charles felt like a friend who I’d known a long time, and someone who I wanted to spend more time adventuring with if time allowed. 

Christian and Charles

The drive home was less rainy than earlier, with breaks in the clouds allowing beautiful light to reflect off the surface of the water. I enjoyed the views and got back to our hotel after midnight, when the gray skies started to turn blue. Another great day in Norway!