2017 Norway trip ("To Hejlle and back" / "Norway and how not to do it")

[Rynglieder]

This year's big run was on the GTR and the trip report was posted up on that forum but I will also post it up on here in case it is of interest to anyone.....

The plan

Our two weeks on the bike had been deferred from the usual May / June slot for a variety of reasons and I started to look at what could be done for late August in addition to the week I had taken earlier in the year in the Mosel.

Two options were under consideration; the first was southern Spain and Portugal but this was dismissed as I feared it would be too hot at this time of year. The alternative was to look toward Scandinavia. I had always been attracted to touring Norway but had held off in the hope that a direct ferry route from Britain would be re-introduced. It is not looking as if this is going to happen anytime soon but I had the feeling that I should try and take the opportunity to have a crack at it somehow while I could, you don't know what life will bring and the chance may never come around again.

After several evenings planning I came up with a route built around my usual target of 200 miles per day. It was not going to take me as far north as I would have liked to have gone, but I was working with a two week holiday period from work (which I pushed my luck with by adding an extra day in front and running it through to the Bank Holiday weekend). It would however allow me to see some of the south of Norway and a little way up into the fjords.

The various routes were plotted out using Tyre and then exported to my much detested Garmin Zumo. I could see straight away that I was going to have problems with it again but I had also taken the precaution of buying paper maps. Take a look at the image below; Ribe to Hirshals - about 207 miles in Tyre or Google Maps including 3-4 way-points or 15,851km the way my Garmin wanted to go which seemed to include unexpected stops in Switzerland and Croatia.

As with previous trips all of my accommodation was booked in advance through Booking.com. I tried to work with my usual £75.00 per night budget for a double room and breakfast but failed miserably this year, partly because of the way the British Pound has fallen since the Brexit vote and partly because Norway is just plain expensive. Also, as per my usual routine I found some self-catering accommodation in the middle of the trip where we could base ourselves for four nights do a bit of washing ready for the return trip and perhaps relax a little more.

0.1 Zumo's plan

[Rynglieder]

Day 1 Stourbridge > Harwich (197 miles)

To take some of the mileage out of the trip and give us a head start I booked an overnight crossing in each direction from Harwich and Hook of Holland. As we had all day to reach Harwich we could afford a late start so did not rush to load the bike or get away. Whist preparing to go I remembered the problem I had had with the Garmin Zumo's power lead on the Satnav bracket and attempted to pull out the pin which appeared to be depressed into the housing. A very gentle tug with some small flat nosed pliers broke it completely, so that I thought, was the end of that. Fortunately the GTR has a 12v accessory socket and I had a USB unit that would plug into it so I would just have to manage.

Setting off around midday we struck out southeast from the midlands using the A14. There was time for a break from the bike in Newmarket and still plenty of time in hand to find something to eat when we arrived in Harwich. Although the sailing did not depart until 23:00 loading can take place much earlier so we made sure we were in the que ready as soon as the call was made.

Cabins have to be booked for overnight sailings and we were able to access it straight after boarding. I had booked a "comfort class" one which had ample room; a small double bed, a single and an ensuite WC / shower. It did not take long to make a mess of it by spreading our bike gear around before getting into some more comfortable clothes for a walk around the ship and get a beer or two from one of the bars. We headed back to our cabin and got our heads down pretty much as the ship sailed, it was going to be an early-ish start in the morning.

1.1   Stourbridge to Harwich
1.2   Boarding at Harwich
1.3 Waiting at Harwich
1.4 Harwich ferry

[Rynglieder]

Day 2 Hook of Holland [NL] > Bad Iburg [D] 235 miles

After getting the wake-up call from the ship's PA we had a quick coffee in the cabin before heading down to the vehicle deck and loading and unstrapping the GTR. Even allowing for disembarking and clearing the port it was still a fairly early start and we were onto the Dutch motorway network under very grey skies and intermittent light rain.

We headed for the first planned stop of the day which was the small town of Heusden. Although this was a bit off the direct route to our overnight stop the shape of the town had caught my eye when I was route planning. I know that may sound odd, but take a quick look at a map and you will see what I mean: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.7336088,5.1431343,1404m/data=!3m1!1e3

It was a good call and a really nice place to spend an hour walking round its ramparts after taking the obligatory GTR-and-Windmill shot. A shame that there was not a bit of sun on it, but never the less an attractive and well-kept little centre that provided a little bakery where we were able to have a coffee and cigarette at a table under an awning and out of the rain.

Next on the list was Arnhem, a town whose name is so well known due to its WWII history. I had picked a street near the once fiercely contested bridge over the Rhein and plotted it into the Zumo as a place to park up. To be fair it had a good go at getting us there but unfortunately it had been the subject of a major excavation for services work and we ended up squeezing the bike at the end of a cycle rack near the market place. If Arnhem has any architectural merit, I would have to say that I struggled to find it. Hardly surprising I suppose given the devastation the opposing sides wrought upon it during the war and there are not many buildings to see that are over 60 years old. We did spend some time though in the "Airborne At The Bridge" museum, taking in the exhibits and film recounting the story of the battles for this strategically important crossing.

The weather was not particularly improving and I made the decision to scrap the next two intermediate stops for the day. They were not particularly important but had been planned in to keep the bike on trunk roads rather than motorways. We had lingered longer than intended in Heusden and Arnhem and it now seemed sensible to push through the rain to our hotel for the night which was still several miles away over the border in Germany.

The Zumo was not going to make it easy for us though. It was very insistent that we should leave Arnhem by the excavated road and as we followed the temporary traffic flow within the city centre it gradually bought us back to where we started. I made sure that the closed road was not an active way-point and had another crack at it, this time being forced back over the Rhein before it gradually and cunningly brought us back to the closed road in the city centre. Back out again I pushed out further following the motorway signs and then when I thought it had grasped the idea began to follow its directions again – back over the bridge, into the city centre and to the closed road. There was a considerable amount of swearing going on inside my helmet as I stopped the bike, turned the unit off and got a proper map out. It must of taken about an hour to escape Arnhem and the history books could now show that the bridge was taken twice by the Allies, twice by the Wehrmacht and about six times by me'n'wifey.

It was then just a couple of hours on the Autobahn. We seemed to be riding at the front edge of the rain sometimes getting briefly ahead of it and at each of our brief breaks we found the motorway service areas full of people wearing T-shirts and surprised looks on their faces.

We parked up at the Felsenkeller Waldhotel at a reasonable hour and checked in to find a good sized room with a bit of a balcony overlooking fields and the edge of the surrounding woodland. I had my back to the window, rummaging around in my luggage when Carole shot from the back of the room, under-trousers intact but bike trousers around her ankles, waddling at high speed and trying to dive for her iPad (one of those moments that you would have had to be there to appreciate the hilarity of it) – behind my back the field had become populated with a herd of deer. We spent some time watching them before the rain came down again, this time really heavily and sending the deer running for cover. The rain put an end to any plans of an evening walk and beer in Bad Iburg town but we had a pleasant drink in the hotel bar and a chat with the hotel propriertor.

Not a bad first day on the continent on the whole.

[Kiwifruit]

Sounds like a good start to your trip Pete.
Though I do ask why have you not binned that useless Garmin Zumo? It has been nothing but trouble for you............ I do laugh at the continued drama it causes. It adds a totally new dimension to your adventure. 

[Rynglieder]

Sounds like a good start to your trip Pete.
Though I do ask why have you not binned that useless Garmin Zumo? It has been nothing but trouble for you............ I do laugh at the continued drama it causes. It adds a totally new dimension to your adventure. 

A very fair question - Having shelled out about £300.00 on it I am still reluctant to put my hand in my pocket for something else but have now learned to use it with caution.

This trip did not go well compared to my previous ones as will be revealed in due course, but the Zumo was the least of my problems....

[Rynglieder]

Day 3 Bad Iburg [D] > Lübeck [D] (240 miles)

The Zumo had been charged up overnight but when tried to call up the route I had planned I could see that it was going to be a waste of time. Although I had put three intermediate stops in (again, just to keep the route off the motorway) it had decided to add several hundred way-points and as I expected the screen would only display "approaching" or "ready to navigate" and no useful directions. I switched my plan to doing some Autobahn work for the morning and perhaps spending a bit more time off the bike later in the day. The Zumo was therefore switched off to conserve the battery for when we really needed it as it does seem to be able to cope with finding a single location.

I've said it before but the GTR is made for the autobahn, it is absolutely effortless at 80mph and the miles fly by. I do miss the top gear acceleration that the GSX gives me, 6th on the GTR is as it says really just an overdrive but given the speeds driven in the overtaking lanes on a German motorway I like to get an overtake done quickly so occasionally found myself shifting down one gear to pass something. We skirted Bremen but then took a little detour eastwards to the town of Lüneburg.

This old Hansiatic trading town has managed to keep a good number of its older buildings many with stepped gables some of which seem to be leaning inwards at an alarming angle. A late lunch was found as we walked around and we also came across some sort of classic car event for which a number of the central streets had been closed off. There was a surprising amount of British machinery running round including a Jaguar, MG and a Triumph as well as the German marques that you might expect.

Back on the Autobahn we eased around the outside of Hamburg and arrived early in the evening in Lübeck, the Zumo took us to within 5 minutes' walk of our hotel but it seemed to be trying a very circuitous approach and we were finally defeated by a one-way system and some bollards that it could not seem to handle. The night's accommodation was the Ringhotel Jensen which had a riverside location more or less opposite the historic Holstentor gate and salt warehouses. At least we had arrived on a warm dry evening and were able to spend a bit of time walking around, the place had that nice evening buzz to it with the street cafes and waterfront bars all enjoying good trade. I had a drink (or was it two?) at one of the bars near the hotel and then headed for bed.

There had not been much enjoyable riding today, too much time had been spent on the motorway, but both Lüneburg and Lübeck had been worth the visit.

[Rynglieder]

Day 4 Lübeck > Ribe [DK] (170 miles)

The sun was shining on Lübeck when we got up so there was a chance to take a couple of better photos before leaving.

The Zumo was being positively helpful that morning and kept us largely off the motorway to our first stop of the day near Plön. This is a little German "lake district", scattered with small meres among the woodlands. We found a lakeside car park with a handy Imbiss kiosk where we sat with a coffee and looked over the lake for a short while.

Next up was Eckernförde on the north German coast where we took another break. We did not linger too long as it was now getting pretty hot and the beach is no place to be in full bike gear when everyone around you is sunbathing.

From Eckenförde we progressed along smaller coast roads until we reached the city of Flensburg close to the Danish border. A spot on the harbour quayside did for our next short break but again we pushed on as there was still a distance to go. It was not many minutes more on the bike until we had reached to border with Denmark.

First impressions of Denmark then: Flat, agricultural and windy. A bit like Cambridgeshire but with more sex shops at the border and stronger winds* A mixture of E45 motorway and the decent (but flat and straight)  24 primary road took us northwards and then west, back toward the north sea coast until we reached the day's final destination of Ribe. Not an exciting ride except that the winds seemed to be chucking the GTR around quite a bit, especially when overtaking HGVs. I eventually got the hang of getting ready to lean the bike back in and upright when we passed one, but it was a little unsettling.

Ribe (pronounced more like REEBEr according to our hotelier – if you read it as Ribe deduct 5 bonus points) is Denmark's oldest city and is wrapped around a small cathedral who's spires can be seen from some distance in the flat landscape. The Hotel Ribe is more of a pub with guest rooms than anything else but the lady owner who attended to us spoke excellent English and did offer us a bit of space in the beer garden to park up the bike. We decided to leave it in the small public car park next to the hotel as it seemed safe enough there and I don't think she had any idea of the number of garden tables and chairs the GTR would wipe out if we brought it in.

After getting out of the hot bike gear we spent the evening wandering the narrow streets of Ribe, walking along the quay down to the old castle mound and finally looping back into the square by the cathedral. A take-away shop provided us with a pizza the size of a garage door and two huge boxes of fries, all at a fairly reasonable cost. The beer garden back at our hotel was as good a place as any to round off the day with a couple of drinks.

Today had been a good day. A decent mixture of roads and places to stop along the way and Ribe is a really nice little town to spend an afternoon and evening.

*I have only ever entered Cambridgeshire from Northamptonshire so I can't honestly say that it does not have sex shops when approached from Bedfordshire for example.

[Kiwifruit]

Great photos   
How does the wife like being a pillion on the GTR compared to the 14 ?

[Rynglieder]

Great photos   
How does the wife like being a pillion on the GTR compared to the 14 ?

To be honest she was very "anti" when I bought it (I think she would have rather I spent the money on a new kitchen instead) and it has been hard work to get her to show any love for it.

However once we get past her mounting up over all of that luggage she has admitted she feels safer on it than the GTR due to everything around her. Otherwise I don't think she has a strong opinion in terms of general comfort between the two bikes.

Surprisingly, I do get a lot of grief about it's carrying capacity though. With the GSX (even when we upgraded to the Shad hard panniers) we carried a roll bag on the carrier which allowed for her to carry a rucksack with her bits and pieces in and she can't do this with the GTR top-box in the way. Add to that, there is absolutely no storage capacity below the GTR seat which means all of those emergency items (spare bulbs, warning triangle, alcohol testers etc) end up eating into the hard luggage space.

At least I don't have to make her lube and adjust the chain now though

[Rynglieder]

Day 5 Ribe [DK] > Hirtshals [DK] (214 miles)

We left Ribe and headed east to pick up the motorway again. I had not got great expectations for this day as I really struggled when I was planning the trip to find much to leave the motorway for. Despite this I had originally planned a route into the Zumo that would avoid some of the motorway but as before it had taken upon its self to throw in several hundred unnecessary way-points and was going to be unusable. Also, a bit of intermittent rain had set in again so it seemed sensible to push on.

We did eventually cut away from the motorway to visit Mariager, a small town on the east coast but after finding a supermarket for something to eat there did not seem to be much to do other than find somewhere to stand out of the rain for a while. The town is home to a preserved steam railway so if we had of caught it on an operating day the place may have looked a bit more lively.
As we were faced with what looked like a wet afternoon we re-joined the E45 motorway and then the E39 and simply pushed on until we reached the port of Hirtshals on Denmark's northern coast. Having successfully managed to avoid accidentally going down one of the access roads to the numerous ferry terminals that sit around the town, we rode into the centre as our motorway day had resulted in an early arrival and it seemed a bit early to find our hotel. In any case the battery had died on the Zumo so we were going to have to hang around the bike for a while so that it could charge up and allow us to use it for finding the precise location of our accommodation.

Hirstalls gave us a very good indication of how expensive Norway was going to be tomorrow. The town is approached via a street full of supermarkets and discount shops, side by side all the way down to the sea front. Only a lot of Norwegians coming over to shop could justify this amount of competition in such a small town. We found a café near the sea front, ordered a couple of coffees and sat down. The moment that they were bought out we were hit by a sudden downpour and most of our coffee ended up splashed out of the cups and into the saucers. OK, we had twice as much in our cups now, but it was cold so we drank up and as soon as the squall was over headed for the Hotel Fyrklit, just a mile or so along the coast.

The Fyrklit is a huge hotel complex, we parked up the bike at random outside one of the blocks took out the luggage and walked over to the reception. We collected our keys and followed the corridor down to our room and when we had it opened up we found that the bike was right outside the door and little terrace that lead from it. There was also bit of a counter with a kettle in the room which cheered Carole up enormously; her small stash of PG tips had been with us for several days now and this was the first time since our overnight ferry crossing that she could see the prospect of a decent cup of tea.

There was no milk though, but as the rain had knocked off for a while and I felt that we had not done or seen much that day we decided to get back on the bike raid one of the supermarkets back in town. Even after a bit of shopping there was still a bit of the evening left. Previously whilst going to and from the hotel I had seen tourist signs for the "Bunkermuseet", I must have really absorbed some of the Danish language in my one full day in the country because I was pretty sure this could be a Bunker Museum.

It was, and I spent a little while roaming around the WWII concrete structures in the dunes around the bottom of the lighthouse. Some of the bunkers are accessible and contain displays showing their history. I felt a little better about our day after our visit. The riding had not been up to much and until then we had not really seen a lot, but at least now there were a couple of pictures of something for the album. No bar that evening, but we both had a cup of tea on our little private terrace before turning in for the night.

[Speedy1959]

What a brilliant and comprehensive write up..
I am impressed.
Not sure I could do the same whilst on holiday.

[Rynglieder]

What a brilliant and comprehensive write up..
I am impressed.
Not sure I could do the same whilst on holiday.

Thanks, I can't claim that it is written up on the hoof, I usually put my thoughts down when I get home and start to trawl through the photos.

[Rynglieder]

Day 6 Hirtshals [DK] > Stavanger [N] (148 miles + ferry)

As we were only a mile away from the Fjord Line terminal there was not too much of a rush the following morning to get there for our 10:00 sailing. Our crossing had been booked for the high speed Fjord Cat service that would take us to Norway in about two and a half hours. Regrettably we were first in the queue – I hate this, I would much rather be following someone else when boarding – and we were followed down by thirteen bikes from a British organised tour and half a dozen or so German riders. No drama though once I had worked out where they wanted the bike facing and we were soon lashed down and up on the passenger decks.

As ships go, the cat' really shifted and was surprisingly stable at speed. We gave the amenities the full tour but pretty much settled on the open deck at the back where I could have a smoke or two and watch the spray kicked up by the boat's jets.

Because our bike had been stowed down in the pointy end of one of the hulls and a lot of cars then parked behind us, it took a bit of a while to get out, but as there are no HGVs on this service it did not take too long to clear the Norwegian border controls and we were soon on the road for Stavanger.

I pottered along with the traffic flow for about an hour in a landscape very different from Denmark; hilly, if not mountainous, with glimpses of coast, fjord, lake or river at every turn. Whilst I was fully aware from reading up at the planning stage of Norway's national speed limit of 80kph (50mph) it was the first time that I had been in Europe that drivers actually seemed to take any notice of speed limits. Most of the time it was not 50mph but 43 or 36 if there was a series of bends or road junction in sight. During our run a few of the bikes from the organised tour had passed us and I was starting to develop the itch. We passed a retail park where a large café sign caught my eye so we rode in to grab a drink. The café turned out to be within the Norwegian equivalent of B&Q but we shuffled in and made our purchase in the hope that we would not be expected to buy a lawnmower or something before being allowed to leave the store. Sipping my coffee on the car park I made a decision to pick up the speed a little as the run was taking a little longer than I expected and I wanted some time to look around Stavanger when we arrived. And this was when the holiday started to go wrong.....

And so at the Vatlandsvann bridge with a straight clear (70kph / 43mph) road ahead of me I wound the GTR's throttle round to give me a blistering 54mph overtake on the car in front, slowly off the throttle a half mile further on, banked gently into the curve of the road, straightened up for the hill ascent – and right into the STOP paddle of a waiting police officer.

Now, let me be absolutely clear; this was nobody's fault but my own. I knew the speed limit of the road I was riding on and I went above it. The police officer, realising we were British explained in English that we were "going a little bit too fast" and checked over my photo driving licence. After just a moment or two on his radio he seemed otherwise happy with the legitimacy of the bike and wrote out his ticket explaining there was a fine to pay, details were on the back of the form and that it would probably wait until we returned home.

We continued our run toward Stavanger. The incident was unfortunate and not the end of the world, but I was not going to let it happen again. I was vaguely aware of the scenery we were passing through but now everything seemed to have changed. My focus was on my speedo, the road signs we were passing and the speed limit displayed on the Zumo which was my back up in case I had overlooked a sign somewhere – I was pretty much blind to everything else. Progress was now at best "steady" and it was taking a while to cover some ground but fortunately that day's ride was the shortest one scheduled for the tour.

Stavanger was reached with plenty of time in hand, although we did have to stop in the outskirts of the city for a while as the Zumo's battery had chosen that moment to die on us again and we needed to give it a quick charge to assist us through the central area. That done, we found a convenient motorcycle parking bay outside the Victoria Hotel, a large building on the quayside of Stavanger's inner harbour.

The hotel had a fairly up-market feel to it despite being one of the cheaper rooms I had booked in Norway and our large room also gave a view down to where the bike was parked on the Quayside. Having changed for the evening we set off to find out what Stavanger was all about. The northern side of the harbour where our hotel was was pretty lively already with the restaurants and bars doing good business in the evening sunshine. We circuited round to the old town on the opposite site of the harbour where we took a stroll up and around the narrow cobbled alleys with their white painted timber cottages – a nice well preserved little area of the town.

Descending back to the waterside we found a branch of Burger King where two small plain burgers and two packets of fries were purchased for the thick end of £20.00. We made a half-hearted attempt to walk the calories off around the park and then continued back to our hotel which seemed as good a place as any to have my evening beer. Two "pints" were purchased for around £18.00 so a carefully considered decision was made that I would sip it rather than knock it back. It was as I was making the mental currency conversion from Kroner to Sterling that I realised with mounting horror exactly the scale of the fine we had picked up that morning – it was not £46.00 as I had rode away thinking, it was £460.00. I would definitely not be falling for that a second time tomorrow.

[Bob]

  great write up so far, that fine will sting a bit tho

[Hooli]

I knew they were heavy on speeding but christ that's got to hurt.