Bergset

Driving north along Fv30, the valley narrows for a long stretch — a wall of pine on each side, the Glomma somewhere out of sight to the west, the road curving with the land. Then it opens. A field appears, then a clutch of houses, then the town hall, low and flat-roofed, set back from the road behind a row of birch.

That is Bergset. It is not a town. It is not really a village in the picturesque sense. It is the place a long, thin municipality collects itself around — where the administration sits, where the school is, where the petrol pump is, where the road forks east toward Sølen and Sølensjøen.

Rendalen is one of Innlandet’s largest municipalities by area and one of the smallest by population: 3,179 km², around 1,850 people. Bergset holds the centre of that — not by size, but by function. If your post arrives in Rendalen, it sorts here. If you renew your passport, you do it at the desk fifteen metres from the front door.

«Two on the coast, one in Hardanger, and Rendalen,» says Anneke. «The coast was beautiful but expensive and full of tourists in summer. Hardanger felt like a postcard you couldn’t quite step into. Rendalen had this — I don’t know how to say it — this sense that nothing was performed. We came to Bergset on a Saturday. The town hall was closed but the carpark wasn’t empty. People were just standing around chatting after some meeting. That detail decided it for me, I think.»

Berger skole sits ten minutes from the family’s house by foot, one building, grades 1 to 10. The kindergarten is next door, the small handball hall behind. There is no separate international school in the municipality — and, the local view goes, no need for one.

When the van der Meers moved in mid-August 2023, Lotte was ten and spoke no Norwegian. The school assigned her extra language support and a buddy in her class. The first surprise came in the first week.

«That’s the surprise I tell every Dutch friend about,» Anneke says. «There’s a different baseline for how the school relates to the family here. In Groningen there are forms and a system. Here there is a person who knows your child’s name within a fortnight.»

Eighteen months in, Jens (now eight) speaks Norwegian completely. Lotte has a slight accent her teacher says will disappear by the end of the next school year. Lotte plays handball at the hall behind the school; Jens has started cross-country skiing in the lit trails that begin at the village’s edge. Both walk to school in any weather Bergset throws at them.

Rendalen has roughly 1,850 inhabitants and a working economy that covers industry, food, building, retail, healthcare, hospitality — and one moss exporter that ships to florists on every continent. Most of the businesses that hold up the private side of the valley sit within a fifteen-minute drive of Bergset.

Anneke works remote: a UX designer for a studio in Utrecht she has been with since 2021. Her side of the move was, in her words, «basically a router change.» Bram’s side was harder. Remote was not an option for him; he needed something local.

The role at Norske Moseprodukter came up at the right moment — logistics, organising the export schedule for moss harvested in the forests above Lia gård, dyed in the factory at Åkrestrømmen, and shipped on weekly to florists across Europe. Twenty minutes south of Bergset by car. It is the kind of role a newcomer with logistics experience can move into without speaking fluent Norwegian on day one — though, like everything here, the Norwegian comes faster than expected.

October was hard. Anneke is honest about this without hedging. They arrived in summer. Everything was light. Then in October the sun started leaving and she had a long stretch of doubting the whole decision.

The climate is the part newcomers most often underestimate. January averages around −12 °C, with stretches of −25 to −30 °C in inland cold spells. Mid-December daylight is about five hours. Snow lies from late October until April. Most houses heat with wood as a primary or secondary source — firewood is part of the rhythm here.

The compensation is February and March: long days of low sun, the snow holding shape, the cross-country trails groomed straight from the village. By the second winter, Anneke says, «you don’t notice the cold the same way. You notice the light coming back. That’s a different reading of the same months.»