We camped the first night at the Kommer in Loon op Zand in the Netherlands. There was an excellent restaurant and bar just a short walk away, where we drank Belgian Leffe beer in the warm evening sun and watched some very serious wannabe golfers play on a crazy-golf putting course. These folk, mostly couples, carried special briefcases containing golf balls and who knows what else. We saw these little putting courses in several campsites along our route – must be a Continental thing.
Our second night was spent at a pleasant campsite near Hamburg, where we were beguiled slightly at check-in by the promise of a restaurant and a bar on site. As it turned out, the restaurant was adjacent to the campsite, not part of it, and was closed that night! Ever-resourceful, we shopped at the Co Op across the road and dined like kings by our tent on chicken wings, salad, beer and chocolate for a relative pittance.
The ride north through Denmark was flat and pretty dull, but we had a three-night break from camping while enjoying two-day stopover with old friends in the Jutland area. By the time we resumed our journey towards the northern Danish port of Hirtshals, my knee pain had vanished, and Peter had found a neat way of adding occasional back support by holding her fists against the small of my back for 15 or 20 minutes; that helped a lot.
The three-hour ferry crossing to Kristiansand via Color Line was smooth, easy and not bad value at £152. Finally, by mid-afternoon, we were in Norway. We’d taken the precaution of booking ourselves into a campsite for the first night, and duly pitched our new Tempest Pro tent close to a beach on a fjord in record time. The wind was strong and getting stronger, and we thought it prudent to check the weather forecast. The wind would continue, it said, to be joined by rain in the night and throughout the next day. Time for a re-think.
I don’t like riding in the rain. I’ve had to do it for most of my life, especially in the early years when a motorcycle was my only form of transport. Rain, snow, ice, whatever. But I don’t find it fun. Camping in the rain is no fun, either, in my book. Many, perhaps most, of the campsites we were to visit also offered small wooden cabins where you could sleep sheltered from the elements. They typically cost three times then price of a basic tent pitch and didn’t seem such great value, so we never tried them. Instead, we found ourselves a decent hotel 30 minutes away in Kvinesdal, booked ourselves in for two nights, packed up all our gear and abandoned the campsite. The Utsikten Hotel gave us warmth, shelter, a view of the fjord, comfort and food for the next 24 hours until the weather picked up and we could be on our way again. It also introduced us to the £22 hamburger and £11 glass of wine, but hey, this was Norway…
The ever-helpful folk on the Valkyrie Riders Cruiser Club UK group on Facebook had suggested we make contact with the VRCC Norway guys, and a helpful member named Tommy Oppegaard had produced five routes for us that he said together constituted the ultimate Norwegian motorcycle trip. He also offered three routes to get us back as quickly as possible from the Lofoten Islands to Gothenburg, to maximise our time up there. Our hotel lay close to the first route, which took us from Kvaviksanden to Lysebotn. This was what we’d been waiting for!
The smooth road out of Kvinesdal meandered along the edge of the fjord, offering wonderful vistas at every turn. That first morning of the holiday proper was made even more memorable by the lack of traffic – we came across no more than eight cars in the first couple of hours. The weather was warm and dry as we climbed up what became a seemingly endless series of hairpin bends. They were, if anything, more challenging than anything we’ve encountered in the Jura, Alps, Dolomites or Rockies. I thanked my lucky stars for the brand-new Bridgestone Exedra tyres that made rapid bend-swinging such a delight, and the new brake pads front and rear that helped slow us down. This was exhilarating stuff, with many of the corners needing first gear and huge handlebar input to keep the whole ensemble on track.
As we rose higher, it grew colder and started to drizzle, which soon turned to rain. For the first time, I felt pleased that I was wearing the Rukka gear and several layers underneath. I stopped to swap my summer gloves for my waterproof winter ones, again pleased I’d packed them. Peter was wearing her trusty Halverssons trousers and Scott waterproof over-jacket and was sitting pretty. Then we entered the clouds, and visibility became a real issue. That’s when we encountered our first mobile roadblock of camper vans, tip-toeing their way around the same bends, often at a snail’s pace.
The road started to descend toward the fjord, lost in cloud way below, and at one point the German camper van in front of us came to a halt when faced with an equally large camper coming up the other way. Neither van (small truck was closer to the truth) could move forward, so they both started to reverse. Now, the Valkyrie ain’t all that good at being reversed at the best of times but pointing downhill with a pillion and 60-odd pounds of luggage on board there is nowhere to go but forwards, so I nipped through a gap to the left of one van and the right of the other and left them to sort it out between them. They must have done, because when we came back up an hour later they were gone.
Came back up? Yes, that was a bit of a surprise, because when we finally got down to sea level at Lysebotn it became clear that the road ended right there, at the edge of the fjord (see title photo). We were both fairly taxed by the descent, with its blind hairpins and occasional camper vans. Peter said to me over the intercom: “We don’t have to go back up, do we?” I replied: “No, no. From here we go on to Dalen Hotel.” However, to my total surprise, there were only two ways out: by ferry to somewhere we didn’t want to go, or back up the mountain! So back up the mountain we went, laying the bike over hard, tugging on the bars, and praying we wouldn’t meet something large on one of the bends.
At lunch, back on level territory, we considered the route for the next few days. Tommy had undoubtedly picked out some wonderful roads, but our goal was the Lofoten Islands, and they were still 2,000 kilometres of riding to the north. We decided to cannibalise the route a little, incorporating some of the original roads but taking some shortcuts that brought us to a nice campsite at Røldal and onward the next day to Trondheim.
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