Norway: Catching Up - the story so far

Routing Decisions 

Destination Creep..

I set out with the vague intention of getting far enough north to see the Northern Lights, a kind of a bucket list thing I suppose. Limited knowledge and research meant that I would probably need to get inside the Arctic Circle which (temporarily) set the northern most point on the route. However, as I have a business contact in Bardufoss which is quite a bit (440km) further North, I thought that would be a good aiming point. Once I had looked at (a rather deceptive) Google Map I decided that if I'm already going to go that far I might as well go all the way to Nordkapp.  It doesnt look that far on the map but turns out to be another 622km (what!). Nordkapp is often referred to the most Northerly point in Europe but as it turns out it isn't quite. If the fancy takes you (it wont take me!), you can take a 25km walk to get the actual most northerly point. So Nordkapp is in fact the most northerly point you can reach in Europe in (on) a normal vehicle without going off-road. The question of whether Norway is actually part of Europe is one I'm going to leave till later. 

Getting there..

The choice for me boils down to a decision between the most direct route from Hirtshals in northern Denmark and a less direct route taking in part of southern Sweden. Although the route from Hirtshalls to Larvik by ferry takes about 4 hours and costs under 50GBP for a solo motorcycle, I decided to go across the bridge between Copenhagen and Malmo. The decision adds 490km and another night stopover but also gives me the opportunity to bag another country, see a rather epic bridge across the Oresund and maybe bump into Abba at Ikea along the way.

Getting back..

Faced with choice of heading back the way I had come, going back via eastern Sweden or heading off to another new country, partly inspired by the Hairy Bikers' Northern Exposure TV series I chose the latter and decided to head into Finland. From Helsinki its just a short hop across the Gulf of Finland to Tallinin in Estonia and then home via Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Easy......I hope.

Timing - How long should it take..

The last big journey I did was from Germany to Spain to attend the Pan Gathering in Leon in 2016, that was 5777 km there and back. Having been burnt by the journey back from the Swiss Pan Gathering in 2014 where we covered almost 1100km in a day, which included a detour to attend a wine festival in Bernkastel Kues (what was I thinking!!) my wife and voice of reason refused to do too much in a day and so I set a rather arbitrary limit of 6 hours or 600km on any future trips. Apart from one day where we had to do 850km in 1 day from Leon to Calpe in Spain it all seemed to work out OK on that trip. We had enough time to stop for some leisurely breaks and it felt quite relaxed despite the fairly high (35-37C) temperatures. However, applying the same logic to the my current route means that its going to take 3 weeks so something is going to have to give, either I have to cut short the journey or take more time off work!