NOTE: The Norwegian language contains a lot of letters that are not on my keyboard. In most cases, I have typed in English without them.

Saturday, June 14th, 2025
Hemsedal, Norway to Kristiansund, Norway
Distance travelled 522 kilometres

I woke up in near darkness which, it is fair to say, is not an easy thing to do in Norway, in the Summer. A quick glance around revealed that the gloom was localised to our room because one or other of us had drawn most of the curtains. I did not remember doing it – but I cannot state categorically that I did not – and Lucie was still asleep.

Normally, I would have sprung into some kind of action but, as I had nothing to do – and a glance at my iPhone revealed that it was only just after five a.m. I did something truly unusual – I went back to sleep.

Who really understands time ? None of us really, I suppose – because only one single second later, my alarm began insistently reminding me that it was seven o’clock. Amazing.

This time, I did leap into action. As it was a Saturday, breakfast would not begin until 07:30, so I busied myself recording the events of the previous day. In the end, we did not make the short walk down the hall to the breakfast room until well after eight – our very late supper had obviated any great urgency – and what sumptuousness greeted us !

As I intimated yesterday, the Hotell Skogstadt was a very upmarket type of place and that was certainly reflected in the breakfast offering. Overkill scarcely describes it. There was everything you could possibly have thought of – and a lot of dishes that you would not have thought of – and all in significant quantities !

I contented myself with cornflakes, smoked salmon, smoked fish, shrimps, pickled herring, ham, cheese and some fruit, all washed down with some English Breakfast tea from Twinings – and I never even scratched the surface of what was on offer. Still, there we are !

Lucie packed with her customary speed, we checked out and rode an arduous six kilometres to our first Foss (waterfall) of the trip in bright sunshine.

These falls were the Rukandefossen, a series of two interconnected water cascades. There was a lot of cascading water and they were very picturesque, but I doubted they would be losing any sleep in Niagra.

We decided we had easily enough petrol to reach our first couple of destinations so we only stopped to buy some water. Then we set off, in earnest this time, in an attempt to begin Lucie’s planned route which would ultimately deposit us, for the night, some five hundred kilometres away, in Kristiansund.

The first two destinations were Gravset and then onward to Ron. I had typed Ron into the SatNav as neither were (geographically) very far away but, no sooner had we set off than Lucie (who checks my work with her own map program) was telling me we had overshot our turning. Mapy (her Czech program) was showing a far shorter route than the SatNav had picked, by a quite significant margin. I turned the Harley around and we headed up a side road. This took us steeply up the hill and I do mean steeply, but apart from a couple of hairpin bends, nothing too troubling. This put us on an elevated plateau and we drove for a time on a good road. The key words in that sentence are “for a time”.

Quite abruptly, the road deteriorated sharply and became poorly surfaced with large patches of loose stones.

This slowed our progress somewhat, but we had survived the Forgotten World Highway in New Zealand and it was not in that league. We pressed cautiously on. After a while, we came to an automated pay barrier. there was a sign stating that we were about to enter a paid scenic route and threatening dire penalties to anyone caught on there without a ticket. Go forward – or go back ? If you have read any of our stuff, you will know that the word “back” is not in our collective lexicon – so out came Lucie’s card and up went the barrier – but no ticket was issued ….
Exactly at that second, a guy on a dual-sport came towards us from inside – and casually wriggled around the barrier on his side ! Ah well !
Feeling self-righteous we set off.

Our feel-good feeling lasted about a minute. The road surface, initially just the same as the slightly dubious one we had already been on, became a sea (or even an ocean) of small, loose stones. There were a couple of narrow stripes, that had been cleared by passing vehicles and beneath which the harder base could be seen, I kept to those. Now I knew why our SatNav had shunned this route.

Any motorcyclist will know how dodgy riding like that is. I mentioned the Forgotten World Highway above. That was only loose stones, but it was largish gravel and basically flat. The road we were now on was climbing slowly and, when that happens, inevitably, there would be downhill stretches – and sure enough there were. The vagaries of the terrain (which was, I am assured, totally breathtaking) meant it was a continuous series of nervous climbs and nerve-wracking descents. A touring road bike weighing over 500 kilograms with its passengers is not a fun place to be in such circumstances. This nightmare continued for over twenty kilometres. Some of these were made worse by lines of parked cars and people who were there to enjoy the countryside, milling about in the road. That, of course, made things even more difficult for me as they could (and, indeed, did) mill wherever they wanted to, but I was limited to a strip less than thirty centimetres wide.

Suffice it to say that, after almost an hour of sweaty nervousness, we came to the far barrier – which we had to wriggle round as we had been given no ticket at the “in” gate. Perhaps we had misjudged the guy on the dual-sport.

The relief of a firm surface beneath the tyres was now tempered by a new background anxiety. The bike began its “low petrol” flashing. Thirty-five kilometres previously, it had indicated a range of 160 kilometres, now it said 55 ! The long, low-gear climb and the best part of an hour in first gear on the stones had obviously used a lot of petrol. Not a problem in a civilised country, surely. Sadly, we were in a seriously rural area and when I added the next destination town, Beitostolen, into the SatNav, it showed the first petrol station to be over forty kilometres distant. It was time for stretch of eco-riding !

Norway is a country of contrasting scenery. It has, like everywhere, latitudinally based vegetation zones, but it also has them vertically. As soon as we descended from the scrub and heather of the heights, we entered lush green farmland through which the wild-flower fringed road meandered gently. Fuel anxiety took a little of the edge off – but it was delightful.

At length, time drags when you are a bit nervous, we came to Beitostolen and there was the garage, phew ! Not only that, but a “proper” garage, with an attendant, not a pay machine. That meant Lucie could pay for our 17.1 litres of petrol (tank capacity 18 litres) and our drinks, without the machine auto-blocking our life savings. Chocolate milk had never tasted so good !

Away we went again. I keep saying it, but Norway is a stunningly beautiful country with absolutely everything you want to see added to the mixture and stirred with enthusiasm. Mountains, some still with snow on them, forests of conifers, normal woodland, wild flowerś, grazing livestock, birds of all descriptions ….. the list is endless.

We needed to keep focus though as one thing you really cannot do is travel very quickly. As I have already mentioned, speed limits are low, people follow them slavishly and overtaking is practically a social crime. This applies even if the overtakee ( is that even a word ?) is somehow going under the posted limit without actually being stationary. If we had not had so far to go, it would not have worried me, but we did – so it did.

Again there was a disparity between where the SatNav wanted to go and where Lucie’s planned route thought we should go. Even the recent, extensive, off-roading experience was not enough to convince her to let me just follow my device. We turned on our helmet intercoms (the Nag O Matic 5000i) and she navigated from the back seat when and where she deemed it necessary.

Norway is all twists and turns and it is always very difficult to know which way, from a compass point of view, that you are heading. I imagine that, in the course of an hour it may well be possible to utilise all of the three hundred and sixty available degrees. Luckily, although it was not me, at least one of us did know where were were going !

Anyway, on route 51, we began to climb again and pretty seriously too. A lot of the high and distant ridges still had snow on them and our route now led us to a high, barren fjell where there was snow on the ground beside the road. The voice in my ears (not to be confused with the voices in my head) let me know that, to get to our destination, we needed to cross a mountain range. OK then !

The fjell was very drab, very brown apart from the occasional patch of snow and very extensive – and not very warm ! We rode across it for a long way, which was quite fun for me as I like wide roads with predictable corners and good, all round, visibility.

In places, there was still quite deep snow, so we took some corny pictures …

Here and there Norwegians in cars or camper vans were parked just off of the road and sitting in deckchairs having picnics ….. Maybe the television is rubbish !

Slowly, we began to descend again and small trees appeared which Lucie announced as the “Taiga Biome”. At least she included the “Biome” part that time, which prevented a repeat of an embarrassing incident in Northern Norway when the single word “Taiga”, which I heard as “Tiger”, had me hitting the brakes and nervously scanning the surrounding vegetation for a big orange cat !

The lower we dropped, the greener everything became and we completed our somewhat slow ride to the town of Vagamo through rolling green countryside. We found a good service station where we topped up the tank and had drinks thanks to the auspices of Lucie’s Credit Card in order to stop inconvenient blocking on her payment one.

Our next (mutually agreed between Mapy and the SatNav) destination was the town of Dombas. This was again a bit of a climb and, on leaving that fine kommune in the direction of Oppdal, I noticed barriers beside the road which would enable it to be closed. Luckily, though, it was open – and what a road it was ! Designated as the E6, it seemed to be very new. The width was great, the surface was good, what curves there were had a nice predictability and the visibility, in all directions was usually into the middle distance. It was obviously at a lower altitude than the previous fjall though because the whole plateau seemed to be, more or less a swamp and the vegetation was, you guessed it Taiga ! Oddly, despite the dubious terrain, a railway line ran, in sight of the road, the whole way across the top. Even there, in the middle of nowhere, small hytte could be seen in the distance and, nearer to hand, there were the ubiquitous picnicking Norwegians.

For me, that was the best piece of riding so far. Even at the speed limit (still a paltry 80 kph), it was exhilarating fun and I was quite sorry when we finally began to descend into the forests and fields at the far end. Again I was struck by the rapidity with which what was essentially a harsh wilderness became the rural idyll.

We stopped for a stretch and fag break with about two hundred kilometres still to go and to sit in the glorious sunshine for a few minutes to gather our strength for the final push. When I went to get off of the bike, my riding glasses fell on the floor. I had removed them to reset the SatNav at least sixty kilometres before and they had sat on the seat, between my legs, for all that way without falling off …. Hmmmmm !

We finally came to Oppdal and had to leave the glorious E6 for route 70, so as not to go to Trondheim. This was still a good road, but nowhere near as much fun. There was traffic too, doing it the Norwegian way, so our buoyant progress was greatly slowed. Time was ticking on again, it does seem to vanish very easily when driving in Norway and I admit that I did overtake a few vehicles.

The road ran down the side of a raging river – and I do mean raging. Spring comes a bit later in higher latitudes and snow was obviously still melting somewhere, that is for sure.

Ahead, the mountainous ridges appeared to be an unbroken line and I wondered how we were going to get past them.

Luckily, it seems that I was not the first person to think that and, at the town of Sunndalsora, we came to the Oppdolsstranda tunnel. This was Norwegian civil engineering at its finest, seven and a half kilometres of hole, straight through the mountain – even at only 70 kph, we were through in under seven minutes. It was very cold inside, according to the voice in my headphones, but let us face it, in the history of the Earth, the Sun had never shone on the ground we were then riding over.

We emerged, like medium-speed moles, back into the sunshine which, as we were heading west was right in my eyes. We stopped, with ninety-nine kilometres to go, so Lucie could have a final fag. We did this at a bus stop that was so old and dilapidated that I feared a stray spark might provoke a roaring inferno and I watched nervously until her tiny foot ground out the danger.

The final stretch into Kristiansund was picturesque indeed. Several more tunnels (though not such long ones), rugged shoreline, sea views, elegant bridges …. In short, the lot.

Finally, we arrived in the town and, with all due respect to its inhabitants, it seemed rather drab and uninspiring. We filled the tank at an automated station (using, for all the previously stated reasons, my UK payment card) and easily found our hotel, the Scandic Kristiansund.

We were given off-street parking in an adjacent multi-storey car park – right next to the Police station !

We like Scandic hotels, the corporate ethos appeals to us, particularly to Lucie, who likes the 24 hour free coffee machine. The check-in was warm and welcoming, the room well up to standard and I was even given a whole carton of milk so I could make tea with the hot water from the machine in reception. Magic !

At the direction of the guy on reception, we easily located the street to eat in and chose the Plan A cafe/restaurant (Nedre Enggate, Kristiansund). This offered an eclectic mix of cuisines, so we went Indian, joyfully helping ourselves to a prawn starter (with a tasty, albeit weirdly green, prawns)…..

…… chicken curry for Lucie, lamb Tikka Masala for me and a Peshwari naan that Lucie had never tried before and pronounced delicious. Even with a real and an alcohol free beer, the bill for what was a tasty and satisfying meal was only 800 NOK which we considered very reasonable.

Then it was back to the hotel where I soon crawled under my quilt and we all know what happens then.
Another day was over.

You can see the day’s ride here ….