This is the story of HUY's visit to Norway. in July 2002.  The weather was nice when we left home, but be the time we got to Newcastle it was a normal Northumbrian Summer..

HUY had a pleasant crossing on a shelf at the side of the car deck.  There were lots of bikes on the boat but no other interesting cars to talk to.
  

We arrived in Bergen in Brilliant Sunshine.  Bergen is one of the wettest places on the planet but from our experience not so wet as Newcastle.  (Where is Mog 2003 ?)

We found a toll road near the hotel.  It was typical of Norway, just a moneybox by the side of the road and a request to pay.  A pencil ties to a string so you could write your registration number on a note and put it in a box so they had something to check up on. We climbed up a narrow twisting road with a big drop on one side or the other through varying amounts of mist and found some snow.  On the way back down we could see about 20 feet ahead of the car so it was one of our slower descents.

The view from the Hotel in Ulvik was really good and always changing.  We could have used up a whole film on this alone.

On one day we gave HUY a rest and took the "Norway in a Nutshell" tour.  We can really recommend it,  It is a long day but the scenery is great.  This is the train for the steepest normally driven railway in the world at Flom.

Several Times HUY needed to stop to survey the road ahead.  This is on the road North from Voss

Another stop this time at the top of the climb.

We had to move from Voss to Ballestrand and as we had all day we took the Snow road above Laerdaal.  This road is closed for much of the year but beautiful in July.

HUY fancied a bit of Mountaineering so he climbed up to the cairn near the summit of the snow road.

This is the view he had

Another day another Fjord.  We did see one other Morgan and someone in a Subaru stopped and talked to us about his.  Most places we went people wanted to look at the car and in a lot of places we would come out to find HUY posing for a picture.  He was particularly popular with Bikers.

After a while we became quite accustomed to the ferries and the climbs.  This one was HUY's favourite.  It is North of Ballestrand a road we took on the way back to Bergen.  He thought it was nice to saunter up at about 50 and then flick round the bends at the end.  You could smell the hot tyre rubber by the time we got to the top, although it hadn't seemed too hard on the way up.  We found that the hills in Norway are twisty rather than steep; rarely steeper that 16%.

When we discussed our impending trip to Norway we had a few comments on the speed limit, the cost of alcohol, the goats, the state of the roads and the drink driving laws.  The Driving laws were well balanced by the cost of alcohol so no problem there.  The only goats we saw were near a farm selling geit ost (goats cheese).   The roads are bad in places but mostly better than UK roads  especially through being pretty much empty.  While some might think a 50mph speed limit a problem it made for very relaxed driving and an overall fuel consumption figure better than 39mpg over the whole 1700 miles covered including the 80 mph dash up the UK motorway to Newcastle and all the vigorous climbs. Not bad from a Plus 4.

We and HUY had a great time in Norway.  We are all looking forward to returning another year. (BTW it was still raining when we got back to Newcastle)

Story and Photographs Dave and Ann Vodden.