Norway Motorhome Tour: One of the most incredible road trips we've ever done!

Hey guys! Many people have asked me if my talks at the NEC are going to be recorded. The answer is yes they probably will be but in previous NEC shows that I have done I've always had an issue getting the recordings that have been done professionally in a timely fashion and the ones that I've done myself just haven't been quite good enough in terms of audio quality. So what I thought I would do this time is record myself practicing because once I've prepared the speech I like to practice it probably once a day once every other day just so that it becomes natural to talk about it. I try not to use notes, I don't really like using notes, so I try to go through it and so that it just sort of flows on the day and on the stage, well every day on the stage. So I thought I would record myself practicing it and I hope that you find it useful. If you're new to the channel and want more tips for motor homing and campervaning around the UK and Europe by all means hit subscribe. But without further ado here is my speech on touring the Norwegian fjords with Wandering Bird. Hands up who here has been to Norway and hands up who would love to visit Norway with their motorhome or campervan and hands up who would love to go but is a little bit intimidated by such an enormous trip and doesn't really know where to start. Brilliant because that is exactly how I felt before our very first trip to Norway which was a couple of years ago now depending on if you're not you count 2020 as an actual year and I really wanted to go in fact it was the main reason that I ended up leaving my job and traveling. I used to be an air traffic controller and the problem with being an air traffic controller is they tend to like you on site in the option room with your headset on and looking at the radar and separating the aircraft rather than sort of plugging in remotely or working from home. It wasn't really an option in my job so when I decided to take the plunge and leave that career so that I had more freedom to travel Norway was absolutely top of the list. It was just the highlight that the dream of what I wanted to do when I was traveling in a van but it was so far away and it was such a sort of big trip and I had been such a big dream of mine for so long that I was also a little bit intimidated. So what I want to do on this half an hour that I have with you is to share some of the incredible places that we saw on our Norwegian fjords trip but also to share some practical tips and advice so that you can help plan your own epic adventure there because you have to go it is an incredible incredible country. So this was what we managed to achieve. Now I'll be honest when we set off having left my job and my husband could do a lot of his work from the road we didn't realize that we were going to be curtailed in our trip so we spent two weeks having a nice meandering trip up through the Netherlands and through Germany and up through Denmark and when we reached Norway we didn't really have a plan we just sort of until we suddenly had to return to the UK very swiftly and our trip got cut short and I will get to the reason for that very soon but we actually ended up spending just under three weeks in Norway itself and I certainly would not recommend going all the way to Norway if you've got less than three weeks because you're going to spend a few days getting there and a few days getting back and you're not going to have enough time in country to really see very much so definitely three weeks absolute minimum but this is what we managed to see in our I think it was 18 days in total and as you can see we didn't get very far up the country so your first choice is going to be do you want to go and see something specific like do you want to go to Nord Cap right at the very north of Europe do you want to go north of the Arctic Circle do you want to go to the Lofoten Island if you want to do any of those things I recommend that you don't take the beautiful but very slow circular coastal route which is what we did here and instead take the main roads that go up through the middle of the country and then branch out wherever you get to wherever you want to get to however we were just sort of wanted to see beautiful fjords and the coastal route is incredible for that highly highly highly recommend it but it is very slow and there's lots of ferries and it all gets a bit you don't get very far very fast so that's definitely something to bear in mind this this is one of the main reasons you've got to go to Norway it's just stunning this is Grangerford it's one of the biggest fjords in the world it's hard to illustrate to you the sheer scale of the thing but if you look right in the center of the picture right down on the water see a little white dot that little white dot is a vehicle carrying ferry it is enormous the ferry just imagine the sheer scale of the fjord I also wanted to show you the vehicle that we did this trip in so we did it in our last motorhome which was a swift 496 besika 7.8 meters long and if that wasn't big enough we then added on a two and a half meter motorcycle trailer onto the back because we took our touring motorcycles with us tramp scramblers if anybody is into motorbikes we've now exchanged them for kawasaki ninjas but that's what we had with us at the time two very significant things about this firstly we were over three and a half tons which made things a little bit more expensive than they might otherwise have been and also we were over 10 meters in length which also made things really really quite expensive and I will explain why very shortly but for anybody who's concerned about traveling with a slightly bigger motorhome or a caravan and a car that's what we took with and I would say 95% of the roads were absolutely fine and the roads that weren't we probably shouldn't have been on anyway but we tend to go off road and do all sorts of crazy things with our motorhome which you could happily go to Norway and not do any of that craziness so let's deal with the first question everybody asks how do you get to Norway there are two main routes you can either go by water and ferry there are plenty of ferry options or you can drive and go by bridge we went across by water so we went all right at the top of Denmark there is a little place called Herschels and there is a ferry that goes from Herschels across to Kristiansand in Norway it takes about two hours and the privilege of that two-hour ferry cost us 409 pounds one way a couple of things you need to know about that firstly we had paid for three adults in our van because we thought our daughter was going to be with us she wasn't and that's one of the reasons we had to rush back to the UK but we did pay for an extra adult and also again the length of the vehicle made it an awful lot more expensive than it otherwise would have been if you are going in 2023 and you are a that same trip will cost you about 266 pounds and that was with a company called Colorline there are a couple of other ferry options as well that you can use some more expensive than others the reason I picked the Herschels to Kristiansand one is because it was only two hours and that little teeny tiny stretch of water is the North Sea if it was having a bad day and you're like me and get seasick which is hilarious because I'm ex-navy and I've lived on a boat for 15 years but I still get very seasick I did not want to be on that ship for any longer than I absolutely had to be so two hour ferry was perfect for me it also dropped you at a really good place on the Norway coastal route to go and visit the fjords and several other things that we wanted to see where some of the other ferries will drop you slightly further north but you miss out on them so again up to you which way you want to go there is also as of last year a new ferry that goes from Holland across to Norway funny enough called Holland Norway Lines that trip will cost you about 670 euros I think that was one way but again you then have to balance that against how much would the extra fuel cost to drive around to Denmark or even drive across the bridges so that may very well be worth it for you if you are driving and want to drive the whole way around there are two enormous bridges which take you from Denmark across from Copenhagen right across to Sweden then you drive up to the Norwegian border those bridges are quite expensive they cost us 270 pounds one way so that was on the way back we drove through those bridges because we didn't have any return ferry booked and we had to get back quickly so we just drove you just turn up and pay it you can pay in advance which will make it a little bit cheaper you can pay it through their website in advance and a seven meter motorhome with no trailer it will cost about 130 euros this time so it shows you how much that extra length and the extra weight as well because we were over three and a half tons does definitely add up all the costs google reckons you can drive from Calais to the Norwegian border which is 1580 kilometers in 18 hours i think that's a little ambitious myself we drove from roughly the Norwegian border going all the way back it took us about three days and they were three really long days about 10 to 12 hours each but we had to get back quickly so yeah i would allow at least three three to four days to hit Norway from Calais i want to also draw your attention to the fact that those beautiful bridges don't always look like the beautiful bridges sometimes they look like this this is the lovely the views are supposed to be spectacular we had awful weather i mean there were some sunny parts don't get me wrong it wasn't raining all day every day but in general for july which is when we went we had really really bad weather however if it does show you that there are various options but they may not always have the stunning views that you want to have a couple of quick boring but very important things to know while we're talking about crossing the border firstly Norway is not part of the EU it is a separate country in its own right so it has a proper hard border so it's not like driving from say France to Germany it's like driving back into England if you like from France proper hard border you'll need to show your passports and they do not take euros you cannot pay with euros in Norway you have to have Norwegian kroner on you and i recommend that you have a little bit of that in cash and currency as you when you travel if you're traveling with a dog they have to have a worming tablet between one to five days before you cross into the country so you're going to need to get an approved vet to do that for you and then stamp the either the pet passport if you have an EU pet passport or the animal health certificate if they are a british-based dog and there is also limits to the amount of food produce and alcohol that you can bring across the border into Norway with you now this is hilarious because there are several places that people struck up there's a huge one called city park which is between Germany and Denmark so Germany is cheaper than Denmark and Denmark is a lot cheaper to buy food and then Norway so a lot of people go to the German Danish border and they stock up there which is fine but then they get to the border or the ferry port and they realize that they've got too much alcohol on board and when we were there it was really funny because there were lots of these little pockets of people who'd realized they'd got way too much alcohol board and they didn't want to pay the extra tax when they crossed into Norway because it's expensive paying that tax to get into Norway and bring alcohol in with you and so there were people just sharing out their alcohol and having these impromptu parties which made it quite a fun atmosphere although I bet there was a lot of sore heads the next morning if you want to make your life easier for you at the border download the Norwegian customs app which is available from anywhere that you can download apps from and in there you can fill in your details you can tell the Norwegian authorities where you're coming what you're traveling in who you are and also if you've got anything to declare so if you do choose to carry more alcohol or a certain food produce and all of the the limits are on that app you can then declare all that or say that you've got nothing to declare and it makes it a little bit quicker at the border so back to our story I hadn't booked anything for our arrival in Norway our first night because I was told you could wild camp anywhere and that is is almost true so we arrived on the evening ferry it was just getting dark when we arrived in Norway and we set off looking for somewhere to stay overnight the problem with the port towns is that they're probably very sick of boat homes and campervans coming off the ferry is a little bit tired not really sure what they're doing and just wanting to stop and I'm guessing they've had some issues with people blocking roads blocking access parking in crazy places because pretty much everywhere around the town of Christiansund had no overnight parking signs which we never go against or chains across any places that you'd think oh that would be a good stopping point so eventually we found ourselves in this layby which was not quite the glamorous start to our trip that I had envisaged but it worked although we did spend the entire night with trucks and coaches and other things going past and shaking the van but I'm pleased to say it did get better now how we find these places is we use an app called park for night and that's the number four not f-o-r and as you can see this is just a random snapshot from the south of Norway there are loads of wild camping spots those are the green ones with the tree and also the black ones with a little picnic table all of those are places that other people have stayed overnight do check the reviews and also if you're in a motorhome make sure that it is other motorhomes you stay they're not just smaller campervans the number of times we've seen a report or a place this is brilliant you can just sniggle your way into a little place and actually there's no way in heck you can get a motorhome in there so it's more van size so do make sure if you have a motorhome they are appropriately motorhome size but Norway has fantastic right to roam and freedom to camp rules and as long as you are not causing any destruction you're not blocking access you're not leaving waste please don't leave waste it's such a fantastically clean country and we do not want to lose the right to enjoy it and the beautiful nature that it has in it but as long as you're not doing any of those things you can park pretty much anywhere and obviously not blocking people's houses or right next to their houses but there's so much space and there's so much greenery and there are so many lay-bys or little camping spots it's just magic absolutely magic one thing you do not find a lot of in Norway if you look down to the bottom left are these little red dots now those are airs we use those all the time pretty much everywhere else in Europe they're basically approved overnight parking spaces which are set up by the councils in order to encourage motorhomes to visit the area but Norway because they have such relaxed rules about motorhoming and campervanning they don't have very many of them because they don't need them there are plenty of campsites around so those are the black circles with the tent plenty of campsites for you to stay at if you prefer to stay at campsites rather than wild camping but we didn't choose to do that so these are a couple of the places that we stayed this was one night on the banks of the fjord opposite Prekastollen now Prekastollen is a really really famous hike we didn't actually hike it because we got there the day that Mission Impossible I think it was either six or seven was released and that was the one that Tom Cruise dangled himself off Prekastollen and they were doing a screening at the top and several thousand people were going up to watch it and frankly I didn't fancy the idea of doing a hike to a sheer cliff with a straight drop with no barriers with several thousand people milling around so I decided to give that one a miss but the camping spot was fabulous the local farmer came past he stopped he said hello he asked us if we needed anything we weren't in anybody's way it was just brilliant and their level of English in Norway is just unbelievable so that was our second night stop we also stopped here which is by a ferry port and we were like oh are we in the way here this we actually went off on our bike so I went and spoke to the local shop which was just over the road and said are we okay here to leave the van they went yes absolutely not a problem at all so we left it there all day I would never leave my motorhome and go off on the bike in a wild camping spot pretty much anywhere else but Norway is so safe and it was just absolutely not a problem at all to leave the van there obviously we felt a lot better having asked someone just making sure but it was just fabulous we also stayed underneath a glacier I'm not even going to try to pronounce the name of it but it was really cool just being able to wake up and see a glacier there that was really good fun and again wild camping spot no need to pay in fact our entire trip to Norway and indeed the way up to it and the way back we only stayed in the campsite one night that was this one and that was because we'd run out of underwear and desperately needed to use the laundrette so we paid 23 pounds for the night we didn't want any electric because we wanted to stay on this little peninsula bit which didn't need an electric hookup so we were able to use the laundrette which cost us a couple of kroner I highly recommend you save your coins both for that and for the sani stations which I'll talk about very shortly and it was just magic right on the banks of the fjord it was so calm and peaceful and even though it did rain for most of the night it was just the most breathtaking views so again you can we hadn't booked that didn't book that in advance we just turned up and like have you got space and as you can see there was plenty of space for us and this was in july so it wasn't particularly crowded now I mentioned sani stations just now and this is how you get water and waste again we find them using the park for night app and you'll often find them at the services and they look a little bit like this little hut this little shed hides the sani station so all you do there is you pop in your krone the appropriate amount will be listed somewhere what you do and then you press one of those yellow buttons so one is drinking water and the other one is chemical waste your toilet and you will 99% of the time find a grey waste grate somewhere in the services so you can pull over and just empty your grey waste in the appropriate fashion if you have got refillable gas tanks there are plenty of lpg stations all over norway as well we find them normally i use the my lpg.eu app and you can still use that in norway but the one that we found to be more accurate was the website lpg nord.no and that had all the places listed where you could get refillable gas they either use the uk or the dutch bayonet so make sure that you've got the appropriate adapters with you when you get your system fitted you should have had the adapters if not ask your provider to give you some new ones and if you do have exchangeable bottles obviously if you buy a bottle of gas in norway it's unlikely to fit onto a uk system you're going to need the appropriate pigtail so make sure that you have the little hose bit that goes from your gas system and will connect to a norwegian gas bottle but that's a really expensive way of doing it if you are planning to do a longer trip like norway and you're going to be doing a lot of trips to europe i highly highly recommend you get a refillable system fitted it will pay for itself in no end question people ask me about are the roads now as you can see here this was a one lane each way road perfectly fine and our motorhome even if it was slightly bigger and slightly longer than a normal vehicle might be not a problem at all they obviously of course have the big motorways that we go up and down the at the centre normally of most of norway and those are the big ones they've got two or even three lanes sometimes but we didn't use that very much because obviously we were doing the the coastal route sometimes the roads are a little bit circuitous but again they're absolutely drivable even in motorhomes sometimes they're very narrow now this is one of the roads i was like if you're a little bit anxious about this you might not want to do these kind of roads this is very similar to actually the trip i've just done up scotland who had lots of places like this so it's a single track lane with passing places and as you can see the motorhomes are pretty much the entire width of the road and sometimes when you're on roads like that they can be a little bit more scary when you have something like this come in the other direction yeah i don't think he realized we were towing he was like well i've got right away and of course he's working we're on a holiday so we moved out of the way and let him get on with his job so those are probably the worst kind of roads with a motorhome but you can absolutely avoid them 99% of the time and indeed you can avoid them 100% of the time if you want to you just won't be able to go to all the amazing wild camping spots that might be on your route sometimes the roads get really crackers now this is one of the longest road tunnels in the world it's 15 miles long the last door tunnel driving through it was really really cool but literally actually it was really cool but it also had these cool blue stopovers and you could pull over you could eat your sandwiches and you're like underground really underground but between that we got really dark so the blue bits were actually really useful because they kind of broke up your concentration 15 miles doesn't sound very long but when you're underground it took us about 40 maybe 45 minutes to get through because you're not going particularly fast and yeah it was a long time to be underground in this sort of black void so that was quite a random one and then the roads get really really crackers this is trollstigen troll's ladder if you have a motorbike you absolutely have to come here we actually rode it two up so that i could video it it was just the coolest coolest road it was so much fun and we actually timed it so that we did it when it was sunny so you could really take use of the views but big vehicles did do it and i've included this to show you a lorry the lorry's bigger than most motorhomes are going to be and he's driving up and down it quite happily now i'm guessing he's done this before but the trick is obviously go very slowly let all the other vehicles go and then just confidently turn on these u-bends there are lots of u-bends if you're a bit anxious either go very early in the morning or go very late at night because the lorries and the tour buses there certainly aren't many tour buses around at that time but don't do it in the middle of the night because part of the amazing thing about that road are the views so you do want to be able to see these views that you have driven all this way to but you can absolutely drive up and down this road in a motorhome talking of driving on roads let's talk about the tolls everyone always says how expensive norway is and it is there are a lot of tolls on the roads we went over 23 tolls in our time in country but they only cost us 104 pounds and 94 pence in total now see that was a the exchange rate of a few years ago but they're not crazy crazy expensive there are a few ways to pay for it highly recommend that you register your vehicle with the autopass so if you don't register you can't use the autopass lanes which means that you're going to be queuing and it's going to make traveling around even longer than it would otherwise be so definitely register and i recommend you get a toll tag so a toll tag has a lot of benefit a you can drive through the toll tag lanes and it beeps and then it does all this magical stuff and your card gets charged money but also it'll save you about 20 percent now if you go on the autopass.no website there are a list of various providers which are approved by the autopass which is the norwegian toll road system we use one called brobiz because we were over three and a half tons but there are several other ones out there so pick whichever one takes your fancy and apply for your toll tag get that sent to you in the post before you travel and then you will all be set up now you can't pay for that and get a toll tag in country it has to be done before you hit norway so that's definitely something to do on your preparations but i reckon a toll tag is by far the easiest and the cheapest way to go around it other options that you've got are internal ferries now because the coastal road is obviously going through a lot of water they don't have roads everywhere what they've put in place instead are ferries now don't think of these as ferries like going from england to france say or england to ireland think of them as sort of shuttle ferry so in poor harbour there is a ferry that goes back and forth across the mouth of the harbour and i'm sure there are many others all around the uk so these are the ferries that you just turn up you don't pre-book you queue and you get on the next one that's going to wherever you want to go to there's no cabins there's no seats you can either stay in your vehicle the entire time or you can get out and take photos as it's going along which if the weather's nice it's always quite nice to do you pay by length which is where being over 10 meters became very frustrating we kept trying to say we were nine and a half but unfortunately they have these marker points all the way down they were like no you're not so we went up into the next category and it cost us a fair amount of money and you can either pay them by card and uk bank cards are accepted or you can pay them by cash and i strongly recommend you have a little bit of norwegian crown with you just in case their car machine isn't working or something like that top tip for you is to check the destination so as you can see here on this photo there are several lanes and those lanes were all going to a different place so make sure that you get on the ferry that's going to the right place otherwise you'll end up going in totally the wrong direction many of them have ferries going in various directions so it really does help to get on the right one so our total for our ferry cost for our trip was 335 pounds which was a lot more than the toll roads but again we were doing the coastal route so we were doing a lot more roads that had ferries on rather than roads that had toll roads if we'd driven up through the middle of norway and that we would have passed a lot more toll roads they tend to be on the bigger roads the tolls and the ferries tend to be on more coastal routes so there are a mixture of the two in country so a couple more places that we visited that we absolutely loved one is steinsdalfassern waterfall and this is awesome because even if the weather's rubbish you can still go and it's a really cool waterfall you can walk behind we had it almost to ourselves it was just a beautiful beautiful waterfall another place that we loved is flomsbanna railway now this is voted one of the most beautiful railway trips in the world and it is awesome however it's really really expensive so it's up to you whether or not you choose to do it you will see some stunning views if you do do it and you will also see the crazy red woman in the dress she's supposed to be a siren and the train literally stops everyone gets out watches the crazy woman dancing around in the red dress gets back on and the train goes off again it's all a bit weird but it's part of the tour i'm talking of of a bit weird this was my face before we stocked up now obviously we visited norway pre-brexit so we were able to take an awful lot of food with us and you can still take an awful lot of cans and things with you just be careful with anything that involves meat or dairy because you can't recommend you now stock up in the eu so germany is a really good place to stock up before you head on up to norway it is expensive it is expensive it's so expensive that we only ate out three times twice was for pepe's pizza because it was so good it's like if domino's and pizza hut and papa john's all had a strange illegitimate child it was just so so good um yeah we did have it twice and then we also had traditional norwegian fish and chips and i think that was in bergen and that was those were the only three times that we ate out in our entire holiday because it is very expensive alcohol is crazy expensive anything over 0.7 is taxed luckily we're not big drinkers so that wasn't a problem for us so our cost for our entire stay the 18 days and country was just over 1 700 pounds which works out at about 94 pounds a day that includes the fuel getting to and from the country and it also include all the tolls and everything else that we bought in country so it wasn't crazy but it also wasn't particularly cheap and that's one of the reasons i recommend you go for slightly longer time as long as you possibly can because you're spending that much money to get there and back that you might as well have some time in country if you possibly can now i said at the beginning that i had we had to rush back this is why so about four days into our trip and it was our first trip that our daughter who was now 17 and had decided that she was too old to be traveling with her parents and she wanted to stay with her friends and her cousin so she left us and you'd think we're like yay freedom we are finally free no four days in i was looking at puppies and i found this little face i was like that's my dog and it is that was mac so we phoned the breeder and she was like yes he's still available um but you have to pick it up by saturday because i'm going on holiday and after that i'm i'll have to give him to somebody else i was like well can i not pick him up from somebody else she was like no and i don't want to know what that means um she was obviously a breeder i'm guessing i don't want to think about it but but we had to go back we looked to my husband i was like we're going back to wales he said what we're going back to wales now and we've got to be there by saturday morning and he's like oh my god we're in norway but look at this face so we actually picked him up in the motorhome with the bike trailer on the back and he spent the first few weeks with us in the motorhome touring around and he's been with us pretty much ever since so i know i've just thrown an awful lot of information at you right there if you would like to get some updates on our norway trip and go look at those costings again you can find all of those at the wandering hyphen bird.com forward slash n e c and you will also find a europe touring checklist there which if you are planning your own trip to norway or anywhere else in europe that will help you make sure you've got all the stuff that you need to have with you and please do come and follow us on social media where i've just come back from scotland planning lots more trips very soon so you can find us on instagram you can find us on facebook we're obviously on youtube you can find the wandering bird facebook group and you can also join our newsletter at the wandering hyphen bird.com website right i hope you found that useful if you've got any questions please do drop them below in the comments and i'll do my best to answer them if you found that video helpful a thumbs up is always very much appreciated and if you're new to the channel and would like to see more videos about motorhome touring then feel free to subscribe thank you for your time and i'll see you on the next video