My name is Thomas. I’m born to and live in Norway. I want to thank you, the reader, for dropping by to share in my stories. Hopefully, here you’ll find some stories and subjects that are fascinating as well as equally entertaining and educational. It is my ambition to dedicate my time and energy to explore the Scandinavian wilderness and retrace the footsteps from Scandinavia’s rich history.
The first steps of my journey, that we have chosen to call “A Modern Saga”, all started earlier this year when I was fortunate enough to discover some new relations and opportunities while working for my company.
Here is a quick back-story: I own and operate a successful sales- and marketing firm called Net 2 Gain. Today I work with approximately thirty employees and my company have taken on a relatively big assignment: to sell fiber-optic cable access all across the different regions of Norway.
But I must admit, having worked in the telecom business for more than eight years, it is starting to become repetitive and just plain boring for me to perform my tasks. Now, I am not saying that the work isn’t challenging, but I do find myself rather uninspired and restless at times.
Has my job taken over my life? Have I built my own prison? I find myself working from seven in the morning until near midnight every evening. Also, the weekends are equally fully booked with phone calls to my employees - - I have to make sure they are up to speed for the week ahead.
I love hiking and exploring out in the forests. I enjoy walking up into the mountains, where I can wander around the wilderness with my fishing rod, looking for my next meal for the day.
For as long as I can remember I have been outside exploring the nature, my first introduction came via my parents. Later on as a kid, I joined the Boy Scouts. And as I grew up, I often made trips accompanied by a good friend Erlend. He also shares in the same passion for the outdoors and nature photography.
When Erlend and I were younger, we made some great plans to travel all around the Boreal areas in Scandinavia. But sadly, after becoming an entrepreneur, my life in the wilderness life slowly faded away. The wilderness was day by day being replaced with and urban concrete jungle. My paths of freedom out in the wild has been replaced by labyrinthine office corridors. Equally fading away in me, is the joy and happiness in life that nature has provided. But change is coming!
Life is as strange as it is ironic. During another one of my “slowly working-myself-to-death” days, I had to renew my company website in order to take on some new projects. Earlier in 2018 I had made a contact, Karl, within a local digital media bureau and to make a long story short, my firm decided to use them to renew our website.
Through multiple meetings of the owner of the digital bureau, we came to realize that we shared a lot of thoughts and that we had a similar mindset... it felt like we had known each other for decades. I shared my dreams of going “all out” on nature with Karl. I told him of my longing to just live in the present and go on expeditions all across the wondrous, beautiful nature here in Scandinavia.
I explained to him further my urge and ambition to write, travel, photograph, document, research, blog, explore and share my experiences as I reclaim my life and my happiness within. Karl immediately adopted the idea and explained that it is fully possible to make this happen if we were put up a quality blog where I can write about and document my trips.
Hopefully we will find and reach people out on the web that share the same interests and enthusiasm for the big, open sky and a burning bonfire. For the dream of blogging and bringing exploration of the wild, “A Modern Saga” need to find the right audience. I believe that many, as I do, feel a bit trapped by the hustle and bustle of modern life and have a longing to get away and to go explore - - to leave the big city noise behind for a bit.
In early autumn of 2018 Erlend, Karl and myself had our first sit-down to figure out how we would like to get the layout and how to get our stories and messages out on the world wide web. During the processes we hatched out the name “ A Modern Saga” - - the name was initially supposed to bring forth associations to old Scandinavian heritage from the Viking period.
Both Karl and I also share the same ideology of “untouched nature”, but sadly we find so very little nature left that has not been negatively impacted by mankind and pollutions. So the ambition is, simply and quite honestly: to “save myself” by getting away from business and big city life - - and to explore, document and educate on modern man’s polluting, altering and destruction of mother earth where we find it.
By traveling around Scandinavia to rediscover some of the history and heritage, we also plan to uncover and explain the changes modern man has done to the local nature - - so stay tuned!
The pilot trip was not a big excursion, albeit is was the first step in a very important direction for me: reclaiming my happiness and my past! It all started a weekend in the middle of November. The goal: to get up to a small lake that lay on a high plateau between two mountains. The lake is located above the tree line and there would normally be much snow at such heights in this time of year.
So already on our first trip I could experience the direct impact of the climate change. Where there was supposed to be fifty centimetres of snow, there was only a bit frost and a thin layer of ice on the lake. Yet the trip was so inspiring that I decided to take on the “A Modern Saga” project and try to make the most out of it.
With our present plans, you will be able to follow me as I walk across the Boreal forest and tundra here in Scandinavia (and beyond). Our readers will be able to follow me into the Southern regions of Norway and Sweden. We have been looking at a lot of interesting historical sites that we want to visit and explore. Some of the more interesting plans include canoe trips along the shorelines of Norway, Denmark, Faeroe Islands, Iceland and Great Britain. These trips will have a special focus on coastal littering and will be joint effort with Kystlotteriet / Coastal Clean-Up Lottery.
I welcome you to “A Modern Saga” and our network of wildlife and exploration blogs here on the OneBitNetwork.
