2017 Norway trip ("To Hejlle and back" / "Norway and how not to do it")

[shaggs147]

Ps.... thanks for the write up so far, very interesting

Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk

[Rynglieder]

Day 4 Lübeck > Ribe [DK] (170 miles)

The sun was shining on Lübeck when we got up so there was a chance to take a couple of better photos before leaving.

The Zumo was being positively helpful that morning and kept us largely off the motorway to our first stop of the day near Plön. This is a little German "lake district", scattered with small meres among the woodlands. We found a lakeside car park with a handy Imbiss kiosk where we sat with a coffee and looked over the lake for a short while.

Next up was Eckernförde on the north German coast where we took another break. We did not linger too long as it was now getting pretty hot and the beach is no place to be in full bike gear when everyone around you is sunbathing.

From Eckenförde we progressed along smaller coast roads until we reached the city of Flensburg close to the Danish border. A spot on the harbour quayside did for our next short break but again we pushed on as there was still a distance to go. It was not many minutes more on the bike until we had reached to border with Denmark.

First impressions of Denmark then: Flat, agricultural and windy. A bit like Cambridgeshire but with more sex shops at the border and stronger winds* A mixture of E45 motorway and the decent (but flat and straight)  24 primary road took us northwards and then west, back toward the north sea coast until we reached the day's final destination of Ribe. Not an exciting ride except that the winds seemed to be chucking the GTR around quite a bit, especially when overtaking HGVs. I eventually got the hang of getting ready to lean the bike back in and upright when we passed one, but it was a little unsettling.

Ribe (pronounced more like REEBEr according to our hotelier – if you read it as Ribe deduct 5 bonus points) is Denmark's oldest city and is wrapped around a small cathedral who's spires can be seen from some distance in the flat landscape. The Hotel Ribe is more of a pub with guest rooms than anything else but the lady owner who attended to us spoke excellent English and did offer us a bit of space in the beer garden to park up the bike. We decided to leave it in the small public car park next to the hotel as it seemed safe enough there and I don't think she had any idea of the number of garden tables and chairs the GTR would wipe out if we brought it in.

After getting out of the hot bike gear we spent the evening wandering the narrow streets of Ribe, walking along the quay down to the old castle mound and finally looping back into the square by the cathedral. A take-away shop provided us with a pizza the size of a garage door and two huge boxes of fries, all at a fairly reasonable cost. The beer garden back at our hotel was as good a place as any to round off the day with a couple of drinks.

Today had been a good day. A decent mixture of roads and places to stop along the way and Ribe is a really nice little town to spend an afternoon and evening.

*I have only ever entered Cambridgeshire from Northamptonshire so I can't honestly say that it does not have sex shops when approached from Bedfordshire for example.

[O.C.]

great report and pictures, thanks for sharing        

[StickyOne]

I'm really enjoying this.
Glad I got a TomTom. It's never let me down although it does like a U turn when it's gone off course!

[Rynglieder]

Day 5 Ribe [DK] > Hirtshals [DK] (214 miles)

We left Ribe and headed east to pick up the motorway again. I had not got great expectations for this day as I really struggled when I was planning the trip to find much to leave the motorway for. Despite this I had originally planned a route into the Zumo that would avoid some of the motorway but as before it had taken upon its self to throw in several hundred unnecessary way-points and was going to be unusable. Also, a bit of intermittent rain had set in again so it seemed sensible to push on.

We did eventually cut away from the motorway to visit Mariager, a small town on the east coast but after finding a supermarket for something to eat there did not seem to be much to do other than find somewhere to stand out of the rain for a while. The town is home to a preserved steam railway so if we had of caught it on an operating day the place may have looked a bit more lively.
As we were faced with what looked like a wet afternoon we re-joined the E45 motorway and then the E39 and simply pushed on until we reached the port of Hirtshals on Denmark's northern coast. Having successfully managed to avoid accidentally going down one of the access roads to the numerous ferry terminals that sit around the town, we rode into the centre as our motorway day had resulted in an early arrival and it seemed a bit early to find our hotel. In any case the battery had died on the Zumo so we were going to have to hang around the bike for a while so that it could charge up and allow us to use it for finding the precise location of our accommodation.

Hirstalls gave us a very good indication of how expensive Norway was going to be tomorrow. The town is approached via a street full of supermarkets and discount shops, side by side all the way down to the sea front. Only a lot of Norwegians coming over to shop could justify this amount of competition in such a small town. We found a café near the sea front, ordered a couple of coffees and sat down. The moment that they were bought out we were hit by a sudden downpour and most of our coffee ended up splashed out of the cups and into the saucers. OK, we had twice as much in our cups now, but it was cold so we drank up and as soon as the squall was over headed for the Hotel Fyrklit, just a mile or so along the coast.

The Fyrklit is a huge hotel complex, we parked up the bike at random outside one of the blocks took out the luggage and walked over to the reception. We collected our keys and followed the corridor down to our room and when we had it opened up we found that the bike was right outside the door and little terrace that lead from it. There was also bit of a counter with a kettle in the room which cheered Carole up enormously; her small stash of PG tips had been with us for several days now and this was the first time since our overnight ferry crossing that she could see the prospect of a decent cup of tea.

There was no milk though, but as the rain had knocked off for a while and I felt that we had not done or seen much that day we decided to get back on the bike raid one of the supermarkets back in town. Even after a bit of shopping there was still a bit of the evening left. Previously whilst going to and from the hotel I had seen tourist signs for the "Bunkermuseet", I must have really absorbed some of the Danish language in my one full day in the country because I was pretty sure this could be a Bunker Museum.

It was, and I spent a little while roaming around the WWII concrete structures in the dunes around the bottom of the lighthouse. Some of the bunkers are accessible and contain displays showing their history. I felt a little better about our day after our visit. The riding had not been up to much and until then we had not really seen a lot, but at least now there were a couple of pictures of something for the album. No bar that evening, but we both had a cup of tea on our little private terrace before turning in for the night.

[Rynglieder]

I've just come back from a fjord cruise.
Be warned that the cost of living in Norway is exceedingly high!

It certainly got very expensive for me (as you will find out when I finally get to the point )

[Rynglieder]

Thanks for the write up so far..... by the way, have you tried using base camp to plan your routes for the zumo, it might get rid a lot of your problems with it. Yes, it's a bit of a pain at first to learn how to use it, but when you get the hang of it, it works well with the Zumo.

Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk

Thanks for your suggestion but I have an idea that Base Camp may be one of the sources of my problems.

I have started using "Tyre" for the first step of route planning as it is based around Google Maps and you can therefore dig in to places that may be interesting and add them to your route. It all looks good in Tyre until you go to the next step.

They suggest that you export the file that you created in Tyre to you device and then export from your device into Base Camp if you want to fine tune. Once this is done it goes back to the device as a finished file.

I reckon all this importing and exporting of data is what is throwing up all these unnecessary route markers which are obscuring the map on the units display. I'm note sure if this is also why it is throwing in way points from previous year's tours as well.

I don't know, I simply can't get on with the thing. It is not as if I am new to satelite navigation, I bought my first one in 2007 and have had several in built in to cars since, none of which have given me any real grief.

As some have pointed out picking the "Motorcycle" option can take you down all sorts of unpleasant byways. (I was that man standing next to his bike at the dead end of a Czech forestry track having another cigarette and trying to calm down).

I very tempted to stick the Zumo  on Ebay and get something else but I don't think I could post an honest description and still have any chance of selling it!

[Rynglieder]

A quick note of appreciation to those who have commented. It is nice to know someone reads this stuff.

Pete.

[snowy]

A quick note of appreciation to those who have commented. It is nice to know someone reads this stuff.

Pete.

With interest! Good way of putting it across, entertaining!
Thanks for updates, bite size is good!

[GTRpilot]

Currently touring in Croatia using my 660, reading all this with interest!

[PRD]

Really enjoying this.

[O.C.]

Interesting write up and pictures..thanks for sharing     

[pross]

Really enjoying this.

+1
Enjoying your trip and write ups on the fly 

[moayling]

Me too. Good reading

[Rynglieder]

Day 6 Hirtshals [DK] > Stavanger [N] (148 miles + ferry)

As we were only a mile away from the Fjord Line terminal there was not too much of a rush the following morning to get there for our 10:00 sailing. Our crossing had been booked for the high speed Fjord Cat service that would take us to Norway in about two and a half hours. Regrettably we were first in the queue – I hate this, I would much rather be following someone else when boarding – and we were followed down by thirteen bikes from a British organised tour and half a dozen or so German riders. No drama though once I had worked out where they wanted the bike facing and we were soon lashed down and up on the passenger decks.

As ships go, the cat' really shifted and was surprisingly stable at speed. We gave the amenities the full tour but pretty much settled on the open deck at the back where I could have a smoke or two and watch the spray kicked up by the boat's jets.

Because our bike had been stowed down in the pointy end of one of the hulls and a lot of cars then parked behind us, it took a bit of a while to get out, but as there are no HGVs on this service it did not take too long to clear the Norwegian border controls and we were soon on the road for Stavanger.

I pottered along with the traffic flow for about an hour in a landscape very different from Denmark; hilly, if not mountainous, with glimpses of coast, fjord, lake or river at every turn. Whilst I was fully aware from reading up at the planning stage of Norway's national speed limit of 80kph (50mph) it was the first time that I had been in Europe that drivers actually seemed to take any notice of speed limits. Most of the time it was not 50mph but 43 or 36 if there was a series of bends or road junction in sight. During our run a few of the bikes from the organised tour had passed us and I was starting to develop the itch. We passed a retail park where a large café sign caught my eye so we rode in to grab a drink. The café turned out to be within the Norwegian equivalent of B&Q but we shuffled in and made our purchase in the hope that we would not be expected to buy a lawnmower or something before being allowed to leave the store. Sipping my coffee on the car park I made a decision to pick up the speed a little as the run was taking a little longer than I expected and I wanted some time to look around Stavanger when we arrived. And this was when the holiday started to go wrong.....

And so at the Vatlandsvann bridge with a straight clear road ahead of me I wound the GTR's throttle round to give me a blistering 54mph overtake on the car in front, slowly off the throttle a half mile further on, banked gently into the curve of the road, straightened up for the hill ascent – and right into the STOP paddle of a waiting police officer.

Now, let me be absolutely clear; this was nobody's fault but my own. I knew the speed limit of the road I was riding on and I went above it. The police officer, realising we were British explained in English that we were "going a little bit too fast" and checked over my photo driving licence. After just a moment or two on his radio he seemed otherwise happy with the legitimacy of the bike and wrote out his ticket explaining there was a fine to pay, details were on the back of the form and that it would probably wait until we returned home.

We continued our run toward Stavanger. The incident was unfortunate and not the end of the world, but I was not going to let it happen again. I was vaguely aware of the scenery we were passing through but now everything seemed to have changed. My focus was on my speedo, the road signs we were passing and the speed limit displayed on the Zumo which was my back up in case I had overlooked a sign somewhere – I was pretty much blind to everything else. Progress was now at best "steady" and it was taking a while to cover some ground but fortunately that day's ride was the shortest one scheduled for the tour.

Stavanger was reached with plenty of time in hand, although we did have to stop in the outskirts of the city for a while as the Zumo's battery had chosen that moment to die on us again and we needed to give it a quick charge to assist us through the central area. That done, we found a convenient motorcycle parking bay outside the Victoria Hotel, a large building on the quayside of Stavanger's inner harbour.

The hotel had a fairly up-market feel to it despite being one of the cheaper rooms I had booked in Norway and our large room also gave a view down to where the bike was parked on the Quayside. Having changed for the evening we set off to find out what Stavanger was all about. The northern side of the harbour where our hotel was was pretty lively already with the restaurants and bars doing good business in the evening sunshine. We circuited round to the old town on the opposite site of the harbour where we took a stroll up and around the narrow cobbled alleys with their white painted timber cottages – a nice well preserved little area of the town.

Descending back to the waterside we found a branch of Burger King where two small plain burgers and two packets of fries were purchased for the thick end of £20.00. We made a half-hearted attempt to walk the calories off around the park and then continued back to our hotel which seemed as good a place as any to have my evening beer. Two "pints" were purchased for around £18.00 so a carefully considered decision was made that I would sip it rather than knock it back. It was as I was making the mental currency conversion from Kroner to Sterling that I realised with mounting horror exactly the scale of the fine we had picked up that morning – it was not £46.00 as I had rode away thinking, it was £460.00. I would definitely not be falling for that a second time tomorrow.