August 25 Eiktunet (Day 333)
Weather-wise, a beautiful day is predicted so we planned a walk into town to meander on the lakefront and wherever our fancies took us. We passed through the Gjøvik Gård and across the river to the industrial building that I thought was the glassworks factory or a distillery. Turns out it had been a distillery but now housed the Science Museum of Gjøvik. In the entrance hall is an exhibit of the table glass that was produced in Gjøvik from 1807 to 1843.
A beautiful assortment of table glass, behind glass, so lots of reflection. The factory was known for its ‘potpourri jars’ and its cobalt blue glasswares.
Downtown was deserted, the mall was closed as were most businesses and restaurants, so we decided to hike the almost 2 miles uphill to the open-air museum overlooking town and Mjøsa lake. The museum, ‘Eiktunet‘, translates to ‘the oak grove’ in english and is pronounced ‘Ike-tuna’. It consists of 33 buildings gathered from all around the area representing a rural community of the 18th and 19th centuries. As we ascended from the downtown streets then past apartment buildings we passed Fjellhallen, Gjøvik’s Olympic Cavern Hall, unbeknownst to us due to construction blocking the entrance and detouring us around the buildings. It is the world’s largest underground public use arena built as the hockey venue for the 1994 Winter Olympics based in Lillehammer! We had no clue as to it’s size because it was built into the mountain above town! Hiking further up through the neighborhood of single family houses on the hillside, we passed a small ski slope with a chair lift. You can truly say you ski down to the ski lift from your house!
We walked up from the ski slope and looked back at an expansive view of the lake.
We reached Eiktunet museum and were eager to wander around all the old buildings, but we were surprised to find out that today it was closed to the general public for a special sold-out event.
The only building we saw, from outside the fence near the entrance!
Bummer! We found a nearby picnic bench and had our sandwiches we had brought along. But all our effort hiking up the hill was not lost, there is a huge public park crowning the hill, and it seems that is were everybody from town decided to come enjoy the day, just like us! There are trails crisscrossing the hill, through the woods, along streams, over open fields where people (and their dogs) were picking wild blueberries, and past areas with educational signs and exercise suggestions and equipment!
“Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood”
It was great seeing the families, groups of young kids, older couples, all walking or biking around the area, all respectful of each other and enjoying being outside!
Besides blueberries we saw a few people picking mushrooms which were everywhere! The top picture has a large mushroom at the base of a huge ant hill!
As we headed back down the hill, around the back of the ski slope, we had great views o the lake below us, but our pictures did not do it justice! We did see two impressive sites as we left the park and started walking through the residential areas.
The colors of autumn are becoming more apparent, and fishhooks are important to Gjøvik based on this huge sculpture of a fishhook! It turns out that Gjøvik is the original home of O. Mustad & Søn, a steel wire products manufacturer who specializes in fishooks. This sculpture, and one of the founder’s son Hans Mustad across the street, are in front of the companies manufacturing campus, now a diversified industrial park, but still corporate home of the company.