Hiking in Rondane National Park

16th of June till 22nd of June:
We have been hiking in Rondane national park/Norway for 7 days. Again we have been here at the perfect time, just before the main season starts and we had marvelous weather except from our last day. And most important we really enjoyed our time here, it has been a long, long time for me without mountains and any real hiking. So I was really eager to enjoy the scenery and we did not get disappointed. I did not have any real expectations, I just knew they had enough DNT-huts and several tops above 2000m and that Rondane is one of the national parks with the least snow in Norway, that is why it is accessable so "early". The real season does not start before July and lasts until the middle of September when the first snow can be expected. So we drove with the car to a parking-place close to the national park and made a round trip from hut to hut. Some of the huts are staffed in the main season, but since we were there too early all the huts were so called self-service huts. This means that there are cooking-facilities, beds, stoves including wood and proviant in case you forgot something or did not bother to bring food.
The first three days we went a circle from hut to hut around higher mountains but avoiding the peaks. The landscape all around was very nice, of course much more alpine than in Austria and we could not use enough sun-protection. The path was sometimes not so easy to follow, big snowfields had to be crossed, rivers to be passed and the waymarks were sometimes not too easy to find as well. We spend around 6 to 7 hours a day hiking and at the end of each day a nice hut was waiting for us, each with it's very own character. After a very long almost 9h walk on the third day we arrive in one hut that is somehow the center of the national park with all high peaks in day-distance around it. We are a little strained from our backpacks and plan to have a break-day but then in the morning when the weather is extraordinary nice again, no wind at all we make a day-trip instead leaving our backpacks in the hut. We head to our first peak over 2000m, walking up a very steap almost 1km long snowfield and then make our way through big stone blocks to the final peak. On the other side it's so steap, we don't dare to go nearer to have a closer look, but it's going almost 500m straight down. The view is marvelous I we see the neighboor national park Jontunheimen with it's even heigher peaks, all snow-covered of course. But we are sitting in T-shirts and enjoy our lunch :). On the way down, it get's even better! Once we are at the snow-fields we pick out our plastic-bags that we carried around for one purpose only: "Sackerlrutschen"(bag-drifting in engl maybe?). So instead of walking down the step snowfield we sit on our plastic bag and let gravity do the job. And it's unbelievable funny! We get faster and faster, the snow spreading all around us, the slope perfectly steep. We come back to the hut and feel perfectly relaxed and happy.
Next day we head further north but we make slow progress, Annina has some blisters that get more and more nasty, we get of the way (Abkuerzung....) and are altoghether tired, so finally a real break day. In the hut we meet two nice Tchech's and have a nice talk after being alone in the previous huts. The weather is getting worse the next two days, the forecast even worse, so we have to change our plan and skip two peaks that we had planned for the next days and head back to our car instead. The 7h walk with heavy rain and wind is the first real test for our rain-protection, but we keep dry. So finally no mid-summer in the huts there but rain, rain, rain.