Book Club

The Three Swords Monument in Stavanger, Norway

Although I’m American and live in Norway, I don’t feel much like an expat. I’m married to a local and we live in a small town which is a long way from the nearest expat hub. My children have gone to Norwegian schools and most of my friends are Norwegian. I had my first real taste of expat life while living the Netherlands from 2007 to 2010 and I liked it.

After returning to Norway I decided to join the PWC (Petroleum Womens Club) in Stavanger. Its something I’ve always wanted to do, but never could because it was too far away. It didn’t seem like a good idea to drive fifty miles through the mountains to hang out in Stavanger while my children were in school here, but things are different now. I only have one left at school and he’s seventeen.

The PWC has an assortment of fun activities for its members. The three activities that tempted me most were scrapbooking, hiking and book club but due to the fifty mile drive, I could only choose one. I chose book club (surprise).

Today was book club day. All the members take turns hosting and since I don’t yet know where everyone lives, my husband and I swapped cars because his has a GPS. I got up early to walk the dogs, get one son to school and the other off to work before leaving. Book club starts at eleven, so I needed to be on the road by 9:30.

As usual I was running late and the GPS wouldn’t take the address. I ran back to the house and googled the directions.

I was no more than twenty miles down the road when a tractor pulled out in front of me, which is a common occurrence here. And you’re pretty much screwed when this happens because the narrow winding roads make it almost impossible to pass.

Another ten miles and I was seriously regretting that third cup of tea I drank before leaving, but there’s no place to stop in the mountains.

Stressing over the time and finally rid of the tractor I started speeding along the last twenty miles. Thats when I realized that I forgot to put my make-up on this morning! (****)

By the time I arrived my shoulders were up to my ears, my face bare, my bladder full and I was five minutes early!

Was it worth it?

A group of women eating lunch, drinking tea and talking about books (in English)… You bet it was!

About maggiemyklebust

I grew up on the Jersey Shore and now live in Norway. I have also lived in Houston and the Netherlands. I have written a memoir called Fly Away Home.

Posted on September 25, 2012, in all things Norsk, girly talk and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 19 Comments.

  1. I love it! Of course it was all worth it, and, for what it’s worth, I walked out to the door and to work yesterday without my makeup on…and not nearly as cool of a destination that I can attribute my forgetfulness to. I have no doubt they saw YOU and were happy to have you join them!

  2. I’m so glad you didn’t let the obsticles stop you! Who knows where this new group & journey may take you! ♥

  3. Your efforts were rewarded 🙂 Book clubs are a wonderful universal phenomenon. There’s always a group of women no matter where you go who love books and a get together. I’m sure there’s evidence of ancient civilisation equivalents of book clubs, and on civilised planets not yet discovered…

  4. What a fabulous post! This made me laugh out loud at least three times! Man tractors always suck and so does that moment where you know you’ve had too much tea (did I just write that…!?). What book did you read? I’m missing my book group. I started one in STY and they’re having their first meeting without me, this week. I am going to email my thoughts and hopefully they’ll be able to arrange the next date so that I’m there. 🙂

    • We read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Have you read it? It was full of surprises!
      What book did your club read?

      • I haven’t heard of it or the author. Would you recommend it then?

        ‘Painter of Silence’. I’m still only half way through. Not really my scene, but hey… I forget what the next one is. I need to get my act together! 😉

      • Yes, I would recommend it, even though I wasn’t crazy about the ending. It was still worth reading. Its full of twists and turns.
        Its a good read for a book club, because it gives you a lot to talk about…

  5. annie siersema potter

    love reading your blog! ❤

  6. I’m glad you’re going – nothing like sharing with a group of women doing something you like. Maybe you should get a motorcycle – then you can whip around any slowpokes in front of you 😆

  7. I love love love book clubs – once you started chatting bet you forgot about the make up

  8. Even if your back teeth were floating? Fun post, i loved it!

  9. What a great adventure! I should look into finding a local book club! I think that’s something I would thoroughly enjoy!

    • You really should. I don’t know about you but when I finish a book I feel almost sad.Thats why its great to have people to talk about it with..
      Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment 🙂

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://flyawayhomebook.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/book-club-2/
flyawayhomebook.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-21
132111
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ISUMTAD2T7OI77KM5CYR5HWXPULFTDLM
<urn:uuid:35796a91-f75b-4d75-9213-7d934513979a>
2022-05-29T11:55:17Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:BFMXI26YMZ6YWRUQWFUKYOL2UKZEAK6N
<urn:uuid:4308662a-d874-4e58-8fef-25b784de94dd>
https://flyawayhomebook.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/book-club-2/
response
<urn:uuid:348b06ed-0228-428b-a80f-3da27c727014>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-21
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-228
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/