It was always a gamble booking a ski-ing holiday at the end of April even though it was in Norway but Mia’s North American treat put paid to ski-ing in February so it was Easter or nothing. We went to a new resort specifically to guarantee, as much as we could, that there would be snow, so this time it was Trysil. The hotel had reluctantly booked us in when I made the arrangements in January, saying they were full at this major holiday time but there was scant evidence of that while we were there and we often dined or breakfasted alone. The food was excellent, including elk steaks which we cooked ourselves on a hot stone. 
The slopes also were deserted (see photo above) which meant that there were no queues for the lifts. The snow was starting to disappear at an alarming rate though, in no small part due to the sunny weather we had the whole time. It was difficult to know what to wear. On the one hand you needed to be protected against falling but on the other it got extremely hot in full ski-wear. As the day wore on, the snow started to melt in places and get slushy and liquid. The next day the liquid had turned into ice patches, over which you have little control when you ski. There were also alarming grass patches starting to appear, out of which protruded the occasional rock. Another obstacle were the deep holes which were appearing in several places. Most of these were marked with sticks so it was easy to avoid them but some of them weren’t and so I was afraid of up-ending although that never happened. For the first time since we started to go ski-ing 5 or 6 years ago we started to explore ski-trails but that also proved a challenge as the snow literally ran out in some places meaning that we had to walk painfully back up the slope on our skis. Gwen and I even tried a chair lift for the first time. We could see that you were scooped on to it by just standing in front of the oncoming seat but we weren’t sure about how to get off at the other end! Unfortunately we were too slow to react when we realised you had to ski gracefully off and both of us ended up with our skis in the air getting wet backsides when we got off. But there were so few people taking the chairlift that we had loads of time to recover our dignity before the next passengers got off.
The video below was taken whilst being pulled up to the top of one of the slopes. The main points of interest are the empty vistas, the blue skies and the empty bits in the snow to show how close to the end of the season we were. On the last day we had to get up at 4 am to catch a bus at 5 am to take us to the airport. Unfortunately the plane was late so we could have stayed in bed a little longer. We even got offered money to take an even later plane but as Tony was already well on his way to meet us at the airport and as it was school the next day everyone wanted to get home so we declined!