It was love at first sight between Dutch Therese Boudestein and the Gudbrandsdal region. She was around 30 years old and said to her husband Maarten, “If we’re hale and hearty as retirees, we’re moving to Norway.” And so said, it was done. Now they are settled far up in Skurengslia west of the village of Sjoa.

The couple had had experience as tourists in Norway. Almost every summer vacation they had set their course northward. The first years they visited Telemark County and the area west of Oslo. Then in 1985 they were lent a house in Kvam in the Gudbrandsdal area of Oppland. Since then the mountains around Kvam became their continuing summer address and they looked around for a small cabin to buy. They had to be persuaded to look at a house in Skurengslia, but they fell for it on sight.

There’s a considerable difference between a big city like Rotterdam and a little house in Sjoa, but according to Theresa the transition has been unproblematic.
“We had prepared ourselves and thought through it for the last 30 years, and found that things were just as we had thought beforehand,” says Theresa.
The retirees used the first year just to be free and do nothing, but they soon the found that was a bit too quiet. Maarten took the test for a truck driver’s license and fills in as a substitute driver. In addition, he steps in as a replacement at the neighbor’s. Therese works, too, as a substitute in the laundry at the hospital. She likes to be busy with handcrafts, and now and then sells things at the local annual fair. In addition, she’s a gatherer out in nature and greatly appreciates that she can find mushrooms and berries right around her house.

She’s active with the Sjoa farm organization and has among other things organized regular get-togethers for knitting and evenings for traditional baking at the Furulund Hotel. She has been especially eager that the valley’s baking traditions aren’t lost and has taken up the cause that people learn to bake flatbread, lefse, stump and lompe - various thin potato cakes.
Therese and Maarten have children and grand children in the Netherlands. They travel to visit them at least four times a year. They also have many visitors to Norway from Dutch relatives and friends.

“I regret one thing. That we didn’t move to Norway when the children were young,” says Therese.

Now she misses most not being able to joke in Dutch. Although she has learned much Norwegian, it takes her a bit of time to come to the point of teasing in the Sjoa dialect.