It was still raining as we left Norway, but the road was heading downhill, promising warmer temperatures, and the rain eased as we passed through Sweden. The promised sunshine materialised, and we enjoyed the empty roads as we headed towards the Baltic Sea coast. The rural limit here was a heady 90 kph in most places, which just felt that little bit more realistic. The Swedes love their camper vans too, and they’re also dedicated to staying below the limit, but here at least there were many more overtaking opportunities. The scenery became less rugged, giving way to vast swathes of pine forest, which gets a bit boring after a while. I prefer the open vistas of Norway or the American west and mid-west, where you can see for what looks like 50 miles in all directions. We spent our first night in Sweden at a lakeside campsite in Bollnäs, eating barbecue and drinking great beer while a guitar-playing duo gave excellent renditions of hits from the 70s and 80s. We took a walk along the lake and found a Swedish pop group playing to a huge live seated audience in a nearby park, doing justice to an array of English and what I assume were Swedish classics. Out on the lake, a flotilla of about 30 small boats lay at anchor, each with its own concert party going on. Four people even had a dining table and chairs on a pontoon!

Having cut out the northern leg of our itinerary, we were now several days ahead of schedule. That was a first; on almost all previous trips, before we retired, there was a finite amount of time to reach our destination, get home again and head back to work. That led to sometimes more rigorous daily mileage targets than seemed ideal. Now, we considered various options, including riding north around the Baltic Sea to Finland, since we were in the area, but it looked a hell of a long way and maybe a bit too close to the dreaded Russia. We’d have to ride through Russia on the way back, or take a ferry to Estonia – way too much extra travelling. A gentle meander southward through Sweden, into Denmark and on to Germany seemed more appealing. Lunch next day with some Swedish friends in Uppsala brought the suggestion that we might enjoy the island of Öland on the east coast, so we spent a couple of nights there. You reach the island via a 6km bridge, which gave us a foretaste of the next stage of our journey.

One of the highlights of the trip was always going to be crossing the impressive five-mile-long Öresund Bridge between Sweden and Denmark. We’d enjoyed the Nordic noir drama The Bridge a few years ago, in which the bridge played a central part (quite literally, if you’ve seen it). The bridge itself was actually a bit of a disappointment. For one thing, there are no stopping places on either side from which to take photos (credit for the one at the start goes to Julian Hochges and Unsplash); for another, the wind was very strong and it took most of my concentration to stop being blown off the structure, leaving little time for admiring the view. Indeed, we chatted to an Irish biker on the Eurotunnel train a few days later and he told us of his experience driving a 38-tonne truck across the bridge in similar winds, his foot braced against the side of the cab to help him keep everything in a straight line.

We found a decent campsite at Rødby in south-eastern Denmark, just 15 minutes from the ferry that would take us next morning to Puttgarden in Germany. I’d bought a flexible ticket with Scandlines (an €11 premium on a €49 fare), so it was easy to change the date. The campsite was right on a lake and within walking distance of the town. Among the usual array of camper vans and caravans was the green vehicle you see here, clearly an army ambulance or fire truck dating from 1952 and converted into a camper van.

We woke early next morning to a beautifully misty lake and headed off to catch the ferry to Germany, which took just 45 minutes on a mill-pond surface. One of the advantages of being back on German soil was the price of petrol there: standard E10 cost as little as €1.66 a litre in places, but more typically €1.69, which was significantly better than the €1.80-€2.00 we’d been experiencing elsewhere. The 2022 price of fuel was a consideration for this trip, but we figured we’d just pay whatever it took – it was either that or give up touring, which is not an option!