I hit a brick wall once. A genealogical brick wall, that is. For five years I had been trying to find out where my great grandfather, Ole Erickson Gaustad, came from. I was getting nowhere and figured I’d never find out. But one night in 2007, I was Googling ‘Gaustad’ and the village where I thought he was born, ‘Byneset’ and I got a hit. I found a function centre with Gaustad in the name so I took a chance and wrote an email. Within a day I got an email back from Olav Braa with promises to get back to me after ‘checking the books’.

A day later I broke through that brick wall. Olav found Ole in the books and told me the story of my Norwegian family (a story I’ll share with you in my next post). Olav insisted that if I really wanted to learn of my Norwegian ancestry I had to travel to Norway. ‘Come to Norway. I will take you moose hunting. We will go skiing and drink lots of red wine.’ Olav has been saying that for 11 years now. And I have kept saying, ‘Yes, Olav, one day I will come to Norway.’ ‘You will never come if you just think about it,’ Olav would say. ‘You must just do it.’ That wasn’t so easy for me … while living in South Australia I couldn’t be further away from Norway.

But the day has finally arrived. My sister, Jenni, and her husband, Russ, were invited to a wedding in Sweden. They brought along my mother and her companion, Earl, for a holiday. Padma and I drove from Bonn and joined them in Oslo. We took a train to Trondheim and found Olav waiting for us at the platform. I recognised Olav from photos but they didn’t prepare me for his bone crushing handshake.

Olav immediately took charge of the six of us, hoisted two suitcases, got us our rental car and off to our accommodation. Olav raced us through a tour of the city of Trondheim – ‘That’s the fastest tour of Trondheim I’ve ever done’, he said – and then booked us into a harbourside restaurant. And finally he made sure we made it back to our holiday house further out on the peninsula and literally tucked us in for the night. It left us all quite amazed with the warm hospitality he showed us.

But the night in Trondheim was just a prelude. The real purpose of our visit was to visit the farm where our ancestor once lived … a farm owned by Olav’s family for four generations. We said good night to Olav and knew he had quite a tour lined up for the next day.