From the Emerald Isle to Africa - in 2 hours

An elephant at Dublin Zoo last tuesday.

Thirteen days ago we left Norway where the temperature was hovering around zero and the landscape was completely white with snow and ice. As I mentioned in my previous post, the sight of grass in Dublin received a rapturous welcome from the children. Yesterday we flew back to Oslo, and as we drove home from the airport, D1 remarked that the landscape looked like Africa. She's never been, but she IS widely read :-) 

I kind of know what she was getting at.  Almost all the snow was gone to reveal brown fields and leafless trees which looked like they'd been through a drought. It was 18 degrees Celsius folks. We arrived back to a very different looking country from the one we had left less than two weeks before. 

Driving around today, my spacial awareness was all over the place. Imagine if someone came along and removed all the walls along the roadsides and between the houses. It's like that. Snow banks totally gone. Everything is dusty with the detritus of winter. Toys long buried under snow are reappearing. It's like being released from an icy prison. It's fantastic. 

Right now, Norway actually feels like home and Ireland is becoming more alien to me. More of that later. For the moment, I'll just say that it's really great to be back.