Reserve a Farm Stay in Gudbrandsdalen for a Week, Three Weeks or a Season

Reserve a farm stay in Gudbrandsdalen and the thing being held for you is a room, or a whole wing, in a log building on a farm that still runs stock. The valley goes northwest for about 140 miles, from the head of the long lake at Lillehammer to where the ground opens out onto the plateau at Dombas, and every old farm in it stands on the one bank that keeps the afternoon sun. The buildings are timber, silver on the weather face and oxblood on the rest, set around a bare courtyard with a store loft standing up on stone legs at one corner so the mice cannot climb into the flour.

This office lets the same farm at three lengths and treats them as three separate things rather than one thing multiplied. Seven nights shows you a valley. Twenty one nights lets the fields change while you are standing in front of them. Fifty six nights carries you across most of one working year up here and past the week when anybody still asks how long you are staying.

Each figure below is for one of two people sharing, and no air ticket sits inside any of them. Divided out by night, seven nights comes to $367 each, twenty one nights to $283, and fifty six nights to $212. What sits behind the three numbers is turnover and nothing else. A room held by the same two people for eight weeks is stripped, aired and made up once instead of eight times, the transfer from the station happens twice instead of sixteen, the farmer's wife spends her Saturday on her own work, and the farm charges for the labor it actually performs.

Whatever length you name, the sequence is the same. You send this office your weeks and the number of beds, we write to the farms letting rooms in that stretch of the valley, and an answer worth having takes two to four working days, because it turns on whether the hay is off and whether the side road is clear to the top farms. Nothing on this page belongs to us: not the house, not the woodshed, not the track up. The farm that puts the key in your hand is the one that writes your invoice, in kroner, on its own paper, and no money moves through this office in either direction.

The sun side, the shade side and the ridge above both

The floor of the valley climbs from 600 feet at the lake to about 2,150 feet at the top end, and the farms sit above it in terraces, mostly between 1,000 and 1,800 feet, on the bank where the sun stays longest. That is not a matter of view. Around the solstice the sun is up from about half past nine until a little after three, and on ground under the west ridge it does not clear the skyline for five or six weeks together, which is why nobody ever built a farm there and why the shade side is forest to this day. The whole valley lies in a rain shadow. Fifteen to seventeen inches of rain fall in a year, three or four times that comes down on the coast four hours west, and log walls survive here because they dry between showers instead of staying wet from October to May.

Distance is the other governing fact. The village most of these farms belong to has one shop, a fuel pump and a school. The shop opens at nine and closes at seven on weekdays and at four on Saturday, and on Sunday nothing opens except the pump. The town with two shops, a pharmacy and the state liquor store is 25 to 40 minutes down the valley, and the state shop closes at three on Saturday, which catches people out once each. A bakery van comes up the side road on Tuesdays and Fridays and has usually turned around by half past ten. The bus down to the valley floor runs on school days, twice in the morning and once at twenty past three, and does not run in July at all. Trains leave the valley station south six or seven times a day and take two and a half to three hours.

What a week, three weeks and a season each reach

A week is one weather and one Saturday. You get up the ridge behind the farm once if the cloud lifts off it, you walk the river path, you drive down to the stave church twenty minutes away, black with pine tar, roughly eight hundred years standing and open to visitors from the last days of May to the second week of September, and you go home with the shape of the place and none of its calendar.

Three weeks takes you past the point where the farm is scenery. Hay is the plainest example. The first cut goes on the low fields in the last week of June and needs three or four dry days in a row, and the high farms follow two to three weeks behind, so a stay that straddles it means the field under your window is long, then cut, then baled, then green again in the time you are there. By the end of the second week you know which of the two shops keeps oat flour, you have been up the same track in three different weathers, and the man who lifted a hand from the tractor on day four asks where you got to on Tuesday.

Fifty six nights changes the arrangement rather than the itinerary, and the changes are domestic. Somewhere in the fourth week your wash goes in with the farm's own and stops being written down. You are given the key to the forest road gate instead of the code, because the code gets changed and nobody wants to telephone you about it. In the fifth or sixth week the plows finish the mountain road west and a whole side of the map that was shut becomes an afternoon and a packed lunch. In the second and third weeks of September the sheep come down off the summer pastures, which takes two days and about fourteen people spread across a hillside, and the invitation to walk out with them is not extended to anybody who is leaving on Saturday.

How the farm holds your weeks, and who sends the bill

Tell this office the weeks, the number of people, whether you want a wing to yourselves or a room in the farmhouse with a family in the rest of it, and whether you need a car standing at the gate when you arrive. We put the request to the farms, they come back with a figure and a written statement of what they will charge and on which date, and you decide from that. No air ticket is sold here, so the flight into Norway is yours to put together, and so is the rail leg up the valley. Whatever paperwork your dates call for is settled between you and the body that issues it, we give no guidance on that, and the answer is the same whichever of the three lengths you take.

Slow Latitudes Bookings LLC does business as Slow Latitudes and works out of 9422 Common Street, Suite 2 in Baton Rouge, LA 70809, in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Call +1 (225) 766-2418 with your weeks in front of you, or write to bookings@slowlatitudes.com and put the dates in the first line. If something on this page has gone wrong, corrections@slowlatitudes.com reaches the person who keeps it.