Sjusjoen

• Pronunciation guide: Shoo-shurn

Originally just a cluster of summer farms, Sjusjoen has been welcoming tourists since the late nineteenth century, when enterprising farmers started offering bed and breakfast to visitors. The first inn was built in 1906 and today half-a dozen hotels and hundreds of cabins cater for the winter sports enthusiast.

The mixture of snowy rolling hills and frozen lakes is attractive and this is justifiably one of the most popular cross-country skiing areas in Norway. In 1994 the XC events at the Winter Olympics were held near here, and of course several thousand participants in the annual Birkebeiner ski marathon pass through the village as they near the finish. But in spite of the popularity you have a sense of space, of being on the gentle fringe of a wilderness, and once away from the village itself you can ski all day and see just a handful of other people.

If you want to take a break from skiing, the regional capital of Lillehammer is just 40 minutes away by public bus. It has a nice old pedestrianised shopping street (Storgata) and a couple of important art galleries, and you could round off the day with a walk to the open-air museum of rural life at Maihaugen or the exhibition devoted to the `94 Olympics.

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Altitude: 830m

XC tracks: About 300km
Skating ski tracks: over 100km
Floodlit tracks: about 1.5km

Downhill pistes:
6km from village and served by daily but infrequent bus. 2.2km long, vertical drop 250 metres. Chairlifts.

Pausing
In Sjusjoen packed lunches can of course be eaten in our hotel, and - if you buy a drink - in the nearby Vertshuset cafeteria. There are a few other cafes in or near Sjusjoen.
Further afield you can call into hotels at Nordseter, Hornsjo  and Pellestova.

Local transport
Regular bus between Sjusjoen and Lillehammer, with infrequent links to Nordseter.