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.

Prelude

In 2017, Lucie and I went to Northern Norway. We have a basic rule that, if it takes more than three days to get to the “start” of an adventure, we may as well fly to the start and then hire something in order to save ourselves a week of travel.

On that occasion, we flew to Narvik, via Oslo and set off, from there, on a rented Heritage Softail, all the way to the Nordkapp. At the time, I was very impressed by the huge improvements to the roads that had been made since my previous visit there some thirty years before. The fjords were now usually crossed by a bridge or via a tunnel – and the need to ride from the sea all the way to the “vik” (the bit where the inlet ends) and then all the way back out again was removed. Travel was comparatively easy. That was REAL socialism in action.

I was aware that a lot of work had also been done further south and that a project called the Atlantic Ocean Road had also been completed since I had last been there.

The crown jewel of that enterprise was an eight kilometre long series of sweeping bridges that join a string of small islands between the towns of Karvag and Vevang. I had even heard phrases stating that these were a modern day “Wonder of the World” and they feature strongly at the start of the final Daniel Craig “Bond” film, “No time to die”. We decided to go and see them for ourselves.

Because there are a lot of picturesque sights in southern Norway before you ever get close to Karvag or Vevang, we elected to ride there on our own Softail.

Wednesday, June 11th, 2025
Prague, Czech Republic to Bad Bramstedt, Germany
Distance travelled – 725 kilometres

Lucie, sometimes known as the “Queen of Planning” had worked out that an early start – and no messing about – could put us in the vicinity of Hamburg in a single day’s riding. To be honest, I thought that, at in excess of six-hundred and fifty kilometres, that might be a bit of a stretch. This was particularly so as the farthest we had so far ridden this year was to Podebrady and back for the HOG Prague season opener – and that was only a little over one hundred kilometres …

However, she cunningly squashed my misgivings by booking a hotel in a small town north of Hamburg – so that committed us !

Lucie is also the queen of packing small ! All the stuff in the red bag fitted in the panniers and the green bag goes on the rack.

So, it was an early start indeed. We were packing the Harley at 06:30 and we were gone from our street before a quarter to seven !

 

Even at that horribly early (for half of our party, at least) hour, crossing the City was a bit of a chore. Maybe some people get up early so that they can be an anti-social psychopath for longer – who can tell. Luckily, we made it through unscathed (at least physically) and were soon on the way out of the City on its north – western side and on the D8 motorway towards the border and Dresden. We said hello to the Říp mountain that has a special place in Czech folklore.

Although it was June, it was actually far from being warm. Before we even began the climb into the hills (let no man seriously refer to them as mountains) above Ústi nad Labem, we had to stop so that Lucie could don her fleece.

We came to what we call the DNA bridge as we passed Ústi.

As usual, we topped up the tank at the last service area before the border and there Lucie even donned her waterproof jacket and over-trousers to boost her warmth. Following her mishap with her old (day-glo fluorescent yellow) over-trousers in the South Georgia, she had replaced these with some (less embarrassing) black ones, but the yellow sleeves of her jacket were a distraction in my mirrors for most of the day.
I decided that I would just tough it out !

As I have remarked before, leaving from the same point always means that the first part of a journey repeats itself. Thus it was not until we had circumnavigated Dresden and taken the autobahn in the direction of Berlin that we were on “new” territory. It is perhaps sad, therefore that all German autobahns have a drab similarity.

This one was no exception, the same endless roadworks, the same immaculately green and ordered countryside and the same, countless numbers of solar panes and wind turbines. Considering the truly awesome domestic production capacity, it is amazing that the Germans still need to buy so much Czech electricity that they force our price tariffs up to their level (he moaned).

We do not go very fast, on our travels, usually somewhere in the 100-110 kph range, but we stuck to it and Germany slowly unfolded before us. We try and stop every hundred kilometres or so to stretch our legs (me) and to have a fag (Lucie) and, every second time we fill the tank. German fuel prices remain at around fifty percent more expensive than at home, so it is lucky that, at our touring speed, the Softail is a frugal animal indeed.

We wriggled through the jams and roadworks of Berlin via a network of road closures and diversions that completely fazed out our SatNav. The one in my car gets news from Space and rarely gets caught out – how soon we forget ! Just to think, we used to have paper things called maps – it is a wonder people ever went anywhere at all.

Hamburg now, finally, appeared on the road signs, but still a long way off. As we headed steadily north-west, it finally became warm enough for Lucie to discard her rain jacket and the distracting yellow disappeared from the periphery of my vision. Lucie amused herself by taking pictures of cloud formations ……

The German autobahn was unusually calm. The areas of unrestricted speed seem to be few and far between, these days, but most of the traffic was moving at our speed or even slower and I had to do a surprising amount of overtaking – not just of freight lorries.

We had deliberately chosen to stay to the north of Hamburg to avoid big-city congestion the next morning and, such are the vagaries of the autobahn network, that we actually ended up going nowhere near that great port anyway.

We stopped and filled the tank with the SatNav indicating that only 122 kilometres separated us from our destination.There was a glass building nearby, dubbed as the “ski jump“. 

We decided to do the last part in two short hops as I was getting pretty tired by then. It was, therefore, almost surreal that EXACTLY at the half-way point, there was a rest area. A quick stretch and a quick fag, I leave you to decide who did what. Then we set off for the final segment.

I have mentioned Lady Fate a time or two in my ramblings and I guess she must have had a late night and slept in. Sadly, for us, she now woke up. I left the highway for what I thought was the last time and, immediately the whole route was blocked by a totally dug up road. Another thing that I have often criticised in the German “UMLEITUNG” (diversion) signs, but those, at least, give you a vague idea – there was a notable paucity of those too, to the point of there actually being none of them at all.

Where we were heading was to the north, so we wriggled our way back to the highway we had just left and headed north on a parallel route. Lacking astral information, our SatNav persistently tried to divert us back to the blocked route, via some increasingly narrow and rural looking lanes, but my flesh-and-blood navigator would have none of that. We ended up going forty more kilometres north on the highway, fifteen kilometres west on another highway and then ten kilometres south. That added over forty five kilometres to our trip at a time when we were already pretty tired. At least the clouds were still photogenic !

Luckily, when we got into Bad Bramstedt (I thought that asking why we could not have stayed in Good Bramstedt, but that might have been a bit risky) we found our hotel, the Happy Hotel (Bleek 7, Bad Bramstedt) without any difficulty. I had actually written down the Harpy Hotel on my back up paper, but let us not go there. It was run by a Chinese couple who spoke less English than I speak Mandarin, but we accomplished check-in and getting the Harley parked off-street and undercover fairly easily.

Our room was spacious, bright, spotless and well appointed – and it was not an expensive place at all.

We changed and walked around the corner for something to eat. From a fair selection we chose a Greek place, Akropolis (Kirchenbleek 4, Bad Bramstedt) where we were greeted with great hospitality and fed some good (and slightly unusual) Greek food for a very reasonable price. The only weird thing was that the waitress got in her car and drove away while we were still eating, so we had to pay the barman.

When we got back to the hotel, I suddenly felt so tired that I did not hesitate to get straight into bed. Lucie claimed that I was asleep before I even lay down – and it was still not nine o’clock. Anyway, that was it for me,