Notes, great photographs and route details from my trip from London to Tromso through Norway and back through Lapland and Sweden.

The Gift that kept Giving

If you’ve ever read a travel journal by anyone who’s ridden in Scandinavia, especially along the Atlantic Highway to the West of Norway, it is highly likely you will have heard the phrase the ‘gift that kept giving’ or ‘amazing scenery around every corner’, and so on.

Well, me too and so I decided to take a look for myself. Actually, with my daughter ‘stowed away’ on the back of the bike and so, to be more accurate, we decided to take a look for ourselves.  

We also took the opportunity to test some new equipment along the way in the testing environments of northern Scandinavia above the Artic Circle, more of which in future weeks.

Bottom Line up Front: Yep! It’s all true!

It’s not often I am left speechless, especially by the view of local landscape but our Scandinavian adventure had plenty of breath-taking vistas. It also had incredible roads, wild camping, great towns and villages to visit with friendly, warm folk who seemed genuinely pleased to see you.  

But one thing I hadn’t read much about before our trip, that will definitely feature in our tale here, is the incredible tunnels through the mountains. Now, there is some debate about whether travelling through or under a mountain is as interesting as going around or over it and I accept the point. However, we were trying to put some miles under the tyres to get to Tromso with a relatively short schedule and the tunnels were built to speed up journeys. But be that as it may, the one thing I hadn’t anticipated was being blown away by the sheer feat of engineering the tunnels through Norway represent – they are amazing!  As a teaser, my favourite being a huge tunnel that after well over 10km comes to a huge well-lit roundabout, shaped rather like a doughnut, connecting to 2 other major roads before ploughing on for another considerable distance and popping out over a huge suspension bridge between 2 mountains over a deep crevasse – simply breath-taking!

Overview

We took a little over 2 weeks to travel from London to Tromso and back. We used Eurotunnel to enter Northern Europe round to the Northern tip of Denmark, caught the ferry into Norway and headed west to join the Atlantic Highway for our Northward journey.  After a couple of days’ rest and sightseeing in Tromso, we took a circuitous route East into Lapland and then south down the Eastern coast of Sweden before catching the ferry from Oslo back into Denmark for the return leg.  

All in all, about 2.5k miles, with approximately 2oo miles/day when we weren’t taking rest days, an even split between wild camping and roadside hostels, one or 2 minor technical snags that needed some roadside TLC to get us home and big fat smiles on our faces all the way round … though we did get a little frozen in place in Lapland as the weather turned slightly more ‘frigid’ than forecast!

Kit Tests

As mentioned earlier, we took the opportunity to test a range of different equipment on this trip to help with the kit selection parts of the VALR Alliance Co-Pilot application. We had everything from tents, water purifiers, clothes washing kit, to new prototype VALR luggage. In all cases the tests were conducted under real conditions and produced some interesting results.

Coming Weeks …

Over the next few weeks, we’ll describe how we prepared for the trip, the lessons we learned when we actually arrived and how that might help another rider better prepare for their own Scandinavian adventure. In addition, we’ll throw in a few highlights from the journey, the route we took and where we might have wanted to stay longer if we’d had the time and the results of our kit testing along the way.