Norway is a fabulous place to ride a motorcycle. I was 55 years into my motorcycling life before I found this out for myself, so, if you’re into smooth, challenging, twisty motorcycle journeys, then you owe it to yourself to go to Norway soon. It lived up to or exceeded all our expectations, including the fact that it’s crazily expensive. We just didn’t expect the weather in August to be so unpredictable.

Getting there from the UK is easier said than done. There used to be a ferry from Newcastle to Kristiansand, but that closed in 2006; and there was a ferry from Newcastle to Stavanger and Bergen, but that ceased in 2008. You could once take a ferry from Harwich to Esbjerg in Denmark, cutting out vast swathes of boring roads, but that too closed in 2014.

These days the only way to get from Britain to Norway on two wheels or four is to make the hard slog across very flat and, to be honest, dull bits of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark – or you can cut out a chunk of that by taking a ferry from Hull to Rotterdam. That would have been good for my wife Peter and me, living just two hours west of Hull, but we opted for the Channel Tunnel because it gave us greater freedom to change dates depending on when Peter’s Schengen visa came through (to apply for a Schengen visa, you first need to have firm travel bookings).

There was last-minute scope for a re-think when chaos descended on the port of Dover and the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone a week before our departure. News reports of massive traffic jams and delays of up to 21 hours due to (apparently) a shortage of French border officials had me searching for a Hull-Rotterdam booking, but by then all the ferries were full. Our one concession was to change our mid-afternoon Tunnel booking for an early morning one, because the queues got worse as the day progressed. As it happened, the traffic at the Felixstowe terminal was only a little worse than we’d experienced in previous years, adding about an hour to proceedings, but we arrived early and got to Calais at more or less the intended time.

This was our first serious two-up trip with full luggage on the Valkyrie in three years, and the first since the completion of my two years of (happily successful) cancer treatment. Peter reckoned that I’d lost a bit of muscle mass in the process, which I had to concede was possibly true. I’d also been getting unrelated lower back pain over the same period, so the question was how my body would cope with a fully laden bike. It wasn’t so bad on the first day’s ride from Manchester to Kent; maybe this would work out. On day two, across the tedium of that part of France and Belgium, the back pain was more pronounced but survivable. Unfortunately, my helmet was doing my head in – literally. The Shoei Neotec 2 was supplied with a small sponge insert to cushion my skull against the hard ribs that live behind the main liner, and the sponge had shifted, but this was easily remedied. What else would intrude to spoil the ride?

We stopped off in Ghent because Peter reckoned it was worth seeing. Certainly, the old city centre was attractive, but getting out of it was a bit of a traffic nightmare due to roadworks and diversions. That was a mere foretaste of what was to come next day in Hamburg, which is undergoing a truly massive autobahn construction project. The ultra-narrow lanes meant that the Valkyrie with its Givi panniers was too wide to split between the cars, so instead I resigned myself to an hour or so of stop-start progress, sometimes reaching the dizzy heights of 5 mph. It was sunny and hot, and the limitations of motorcycle weight and the wrong riding gear became obvious very quickly.

The back pain of the previous day was getting worse and had now been joined by a sharp pain in my left kneecap whenever I put my left foot down, and a whole new set of pains in my right wrist, bicep and shoulder. The weather was hot, and my Rukka winter riding gear just added to the general discomfort. I found the weight of the luggage, albeit with only the lightest stuff like sleeping bags up high, was creating a sort of pendulum effect at very low speed, making the roadworks section tedious, difficult and painful. For the first time, I really did wonder whether my aging body would manage to get us all the way to the Arctic Circle and back. That afternoon, the jury was definitely out.